Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

MOO as Tool, MOO as Realm: A Response to Don Langham

It is unlikely that Michael Heim, David Bennahum, Don Langham or any member of the first generation of cybernauts will be able to accurately describe or assess the realm of the new technology; as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, we are blinded by our own cultural upbringing, and the realm of cyberspace is certainly one that cannot be inhabited for at least another full generation.

Internet Privatization Adrift

A commercialized Internet will grow in scope to rival the voice telephone network, providing all sorts of commercial services, including entertainment Ð perhaps replacing the television Ð transaction processing and information services … What will make commercialization possible is the looming turnover by the government of network control and direct funding to the private sector.

Beyond the Cyberhype: What the Internet Means to the Congressman of the Future

Obviously, mandating Internet technological standards in the federal government is out of the question since legislation and regulation have a much longer product cycle than the typical 18-month age span of computer ideas and technology. Similarly, the regulation of “information content” is unmanageable due to the sheer number of information providers – literally millions.

The Message is the Medium: A Reply to Sven Birkerts and the ‘Gutenberg Elegies’

The Internet has vast potential to expand the audience for works of the literary imagination; and not only to expand access but also opportunities for interactivity, and for building communities of creative minds that could not exist otherwise. It’s a lovely picture, one I’d like to believe in. But I know it is more likely that the Internet will become a vast cyberspace mall, every bit as commercialized as any other mass medium in a free-market society … It is … important that we do not surrender cyberspace and the new media to the purely market-driven forces of late-20th-century multinational capitalism. There are other values – values which cannot be measured in monetary units – that will survive only if we vigilantly carve out a space for them to breathe.

Cyberspace: Some Proposals

In time, the detained and perhaps painful reexamination of the constraints, laws, and opportunities of the natural and physical life-world necessarily undertaken by cyberspace’s first designers will become less frequent and less necessary. The second generation of builders will find that the new reality has its own, seemingly self-evident, rules.