Online with William Gibson; Present at the Creation; Startled at the Reality
The present is more frightening than any imaginable future I might dream up … If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, he’d have a nervous breakdown.
Archives: Expert Predictions
The Way We Make Wealth
Electronic pathways form the essential infrastructure of the Third Wave economy … taken together … [the] features of the Third Wave economy … add up to a monumental change in how wealth is created.
Internet Evolution or Revolution?
By 1997, the Internet and all online connectivity utilities will be as pervasive as the telephone. Most people will have Internet access at work or at home. Anyone who wants an online address will be able to get one.
Internet Evolution or Revolution?
ATM will not become the universal switching fabric that replaces the Internet. Rather, we think it will be used as a high-performance data-link layer underneath IP, similar to FDDI, Ethernet, or ISDN.
Internet Evolution or Revolution?
In two years, today’s WWW browsers will be as outdated as a lime-green polyester leisure suit. By the time this article is published, there should be a new crop of browsers that integrate the WWW, e-mail, netnews, remote login, and other network services. These browsers will accept powerful scripting languages from servers. This will enable browsers and users to interact in a variety of ways. Browsers will also interact with one another and with network services. Actually, the possibilities are limitless.
Internet Evolution or Revolution?
The future growth of the Internet will not be determined solely on the basis of technical excellence … The network’s growth is too rapid to plan its path; the new breed of Internet entrepreneurs will undoubtedly effect many changes not anticipated by computer scientists and engineers … Within only two years the network will start to work subtle but significant changes in our cultural fabric.
Introduction
Hackers are significant because of what our fear of them says about our unease with new technologies … The fallout from this fear is already apparent … It is possible that once computer networks become as commonplace as our national highway system, we will learn to treat them in much the same way. Rules of the road will emerge, and people will learn to respect them for their own safety and for the common good.
Scholars Try to Measure the Impact
Overwhelmed by data and distracted by fantasy, our attention span could become reduced to the content-poor shards of an MTV video. We risk becoming mentally poorer, mistaking data for knowledge, distanced from wisdom and blind to both beauty and the terrors of intangible, felt existence.
Scholars Try to Measure the Impact
A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee, no interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert, and who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?
Scholars Try to Measure the Impact
[Technology could turn many computer users into] electronic shut-ins [detached from real-world problems and experiences – and from society’s disadvantaged] … Digitized encounters with reality can erode the human capacity for significance. Putting faith in reams of data can foster a god-like omniscience, a false sense of being in control and a detachment from the world of physical cause and effect.