There is a broad consensus in government and industry that the National Information Infrastructure, as the Clinton Administration prefers to call the info highway, will be a broadband, switched network that could, in theory, deliver all … things. But how it will be structured and how it will be deployed are not so clear.
There are massive have/have not discrepancies in the use of language per se. I believe that a similar dynamic applies to so-called computer literacy. Giving everbody a free computer and modem wouldn’t change this basal reality very much.
I think the best paradigm for the Internet is to forget that its a technology and pretend that it’s a language … [The] Internet behaves more like the English language than like a technology … I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing nowadays. There’s something primally exhilarating about being in a bus without brakes.
The phone companies that survive will become cellular phone companies. “Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime” is a good motto for a 21st century phone company. There will be flat rates for so-called “long-distance.” Any nation or PTT which tries to cling to current long-distance telephony billing practices will see their economy destroyed by others with more enlightened policies.
The desktop PC as the hub, or server, of an “information structure.” This structure will include the interactive cable-TV system, wireless phones and a variety of different-size PCs scattered about the house, car and office, all connected via wireless networks.
Many computer professionals and academics say the electronic frontier needs a preacher as well as a sheriff. Like non-virtual reality, cyberspace needs self-regulating codes of behavior … “There is no technological fix for ethics.”
The criterion of local self-governance is breached if involvement in spatially dispersed social networks grows to subvert a collective capacity to govern the locales people physically inhabit. And the criterion of egalitarian empowerment is breached if coveys of technorich cronies are empowered to telelobby senators, while technopoor neighbors are excluded from the circuit.
It seems morally hazardous to commune with far-flung tele-mates, if that means growing indifferent to physical neighbors. It is not encouraging to observe just such indifference in California’s Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most “highly wired” regions.
An entire virtual community can atrophy or perish in the wink of an eye. To the extent that membership in virtual communities proves less stable than that obtained in other forms of democratic community, or that social relations prove less thick … there could be adverse consequences for individual psychological and moral development.
Screen-based technologies (such as TV and computer monitors) are prone to induce democratically unpromising psychopathologies, ranging from escapism to passivity, obsession, confusing watching with doing, withdrawal from other forms of social engagement, or distancing from moral consequences.