Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
[In the media’s future] Families will regroup around the evolving silicon hearths of a new cottage economy.
Archives: Expert Predictions
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
The future of media will see … the most deprived ghetto child in the most blighted project can escape the local demogogues who hold him down and can gain educational opportunities exceeding those of a suburban preppie today.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
The computer culture will blow away the facade of TV and allow the conservative Americans who sustain the economy once again to realize that their private lives make up the real culture of an America that can survive and prosper.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
In politics, the teleputer [networked computer] will break the bondage of public opinion.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
The future of media will see the further ascendancy of the word. As screens improve their resolution, they will increasingly compete with paper as a high-contrast, flicker-free vessel for text. Great cities will hollow out, as the best and brightest in them retreat to rural redoubts and reach out to global markets and communities.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
Teleputers [networked computers] will allow many of the 50,000 screenwriters who now queue up before the Hollywood bottleneck instead to reach substantial audiences around the world not by pandering to mobs but by appealing to special interests and passions.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
The spearhead of the new era is electronic mail, on the verge of expanding to video or multimedia mail.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
By changing radically the balance of power between the distributors of culture and the receivers of culture, the teleputer [networked computer] will forever break the broadcast bottleneck. Potentially, there will be as many “channels” as there are computers connected to the global network. In essence, this means one channel for each person, which he himself programs and controls and which always offers his very first choice … Artists will be able to command a large audience without catering to lowest-common-denominator tastes.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
Within the next 10 years, this explosive technological advance in both networks and processors virtually guarantees that the personal-computer model of distributed intelligence and control will unseat the emperors of the mass media and blow away the television model of centralization. The teleputer – a revolutionary PC of the next decade – will give every household hacker the productive potential of a factory czar of the industrial era and the communications power of a broadcast tycoon of the television age. Broadcasting hierarchies will give way to computer heterarchies – peer networks in which the terminals are essentially equal in power and there is no center at all.
Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box
The key to the culture is not its perversions but its aspirations and opportunities for distinction. By refracting the mass media into myriad media, the teleputer [networked computer] will open the way to floods of new programming.