Most people think that what you read in The New York Times is probably a pretty reasonable representation of world events. But over the Internet, there’s a real danger that people would only see what their provider wants them to see or what their religious/ethnic group wants them to see, and you could see a breakdown on the notion of consensus truth.
The promise of electronic access is plagued by the problems of privacy, data security, lack of availability of the needed hardware and software for the public user, cost, inconsistent data formats, a patchwork of pricing schemes, absence of metadata, and lack of expert support for the public user. But more fundamental than those problems is that government collects and saves far more information than even it needs, this information is often redundant, and it is of no interest to anyone.
Let the copies breed. Whatever it is that we are constructing by connecting everything to everything, we know the big thing will copy effortlessly. The I-way is a gigantic copy machine. It is a law of the digital realm: anything digital will be copied, and anything copied once will fill the universe. Further, every effort to restrict copying is doomed to failure.
The I-way will rearrange the writing space of the printed book into a new writing space larger and more complex than ink on paper. The instrumentation of our lives can be seen as part of that “writing space.” As data from weather sensors, demographic surveys, cash registers, all the millions of electronic information generators pour forth their words into the Net, they enlarge the writing space of our times. Their information becomes part of what we know, part of our meaning.
As a Net user, you start to view yourself as an individual cell in this growing global brain. Online users form connections to learn and grow, as brain cells do. Eventually we’ll develop a global memory, a global ethic.
Electronic money will transform our economy and our behavior.
The common vision is we want to be able to get anything, anytime, anywhere – total ‘net capability … My gut certainty is that there is something important happening here … Instead of mindless chatter, people started having real conversations, developing bonds. It’s not the end-all, but nontheless, it won’t go away.
Modern culture is a classic example of “more is less.” The more detail you’re exposed to, the less room there is in your head, or your soul, to reflect, understand or make sense of anything. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that any of this information has made people feel particularly wise … The moral fabric of the world may have gone several inventions ago.
It’s a constant in American culture, this belief that new technology will either save us or spoil us. It says we like solving our problems with technological fantasies and we fear our moral fiber can’t withstand it … If we’re prisoners, we’re prisoners by our own design. Technology is such a part of our culture, you could argue that it is our culture. Where it goes is where we go, good or bad.
One of the grimmest visions of the information frontier painted by cyberpunk writers, is a world controlled by megalomaniac hackers or even multinational companies who sedate the masses with endless doses of entertainment programs and home-shopping pitches.