Over the next decade, the telecommunications systems of the world will be rebuilt from the ground up as copper wires are ripped up and replaced by hair-thin fiber-optic strands.
Yes, networks can help people strengthen neighborhoods and communities. But they also encourage people to find ways out. Unhappy with your schools? Join the parents who have turned to home schooling … Any future information network will help unhappy people secede, at least mentally, from institutions they do not like, much as the interstate highway system allowed the affluent to flee the cities for the suburbs and exurbs. Prescribing mobility, whether automotive or electronic, as an antidote to society’s fragmentation is like recommending champagne as a hangover remedy.
[If there emerges] considerable freedom for individuals in their use of the NII, people will exploit it in currently unimagined and unsanctioned ways. To many people, some of what occurs will seem wasteful, disgusting, obscene, sexist, racist, even criminal … We must protect the speech that most offends us and the religious beliefs we find most stupid and repulsive … The possibility remains that the NII could turn into a largely one-way street, one where “consumers” receive information but will not have freedom to retransmit or alter it. This is the “500 channels of TV” model, the worst scenario for the future because it implies an audience composed of inert consumers and passive paracitizens, easily manipulated by any technically adept spin doctors.
It may become possible for businesses and arms of the government to acquire an intimate knowledge of every citizen – what we love and hate, what compels us and what we ignore – and with it perhaps the ability to manipulate our needs and our behavior. Every choice we make could be recorded, as could every moment of consumer bliss or image consumption. We could be profiled in terrifying detail, almost casually, as a kind of side-effect of the network software. Viewed this way, the NII becomes the Panopticon triumphant.
The Internet will not work as a mass medium in the future. There is no revenue stream … and it requires too much time and expertise to learn and use. The future will not look like America Online, Minitel, or Internet. If the information superhighway is to be for all, then it cannot (and should not) be limited by price, technological crudity, or scientific configuration. The new infohighway ought to be as advanced as possible and available to all who might like to use it.
The basic device serving consumers at home will almost certainly be some sort of hybrid telecomputer that marries a computer processor and a television screen … A CD-ROM component will allow consumers to store and later retrieve data, from train timetables to family photographs … All of this will be enormously expensive. Even allowing for the fact that competition can be counted on to drive down costs, telecomputers of the sort described here will cost thousands of dollars each … Much as we like to think of the infohighway as the centerpiece of a “postindustrial” era, building it will be a very old-fashioned capital-intensive undertaking. It will take a long time, and it will be very expensive.
Many of the futurists who see a new day dawning are going to be disappointed by what they find at dawn’s early light. The notion that people who spend dozens of hours watching sitcoms every week and never read a newspaper will somehow be transformed into Renaissance men and women by the availability of new information services in the home seems overly hopeful, to say the least.
The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s. It’s going to have that power.
Consumers don’t want to deal with the First Bank of Nowhere. They want to deal with people they know. The problem of consumer reluctance “will frankly take one to two decades to solve.”
The Internet and online services have lured hundreds of companies eager to set up shop. But some experts say it could take a decade or two for full-blown electronic commerce to migrate to the desktop computers of mainstream America … Electronic commerce “is still a twinkle in the eyes of the retail, financial services and technology companies. It’s not here yet.”