The gap between personal and mass media … is being filled by such technologies as community-produced cable television, electronically filtered news, computer discussion groups, and, I would argue, community networks.
A fleet of passenger vans, each equipped with a global-positioning system and cellular phone … all linked by computer to a central dispatching program, would provide total customized coverage of every street and every neighborhood in town, 25 hours a day. Through the computer and the cell phones, drivers would receive destination instructions; using GPS, dispatchers would keep tabs on the real-time progress of each vehicle. Passengers would call up the service, be met with minimum delay, transfer only if necessary and relax while professional drivers took them to their desired destination.
For the next decade, at least, the key to the consumer’s heart will be less in the technology itself than in the masking of technology to make it more user-friendly.
In future supermarkets, consumers will shop without having to pay cash or sign credit-card receipts. An infrared or microwave “interrogator” could register each customer as soon as he or she enters a store and be ready with account information when the time comes to pay … Carts might even be programmed to organize the customer’s shopping expedition through the store by scanning a hand-written list and sorting out the fastest route through the aisles.
Flat-panel screens bearing a multitude of images will be household regulars. They will range from tiny ones, costing perhaps $5 each and plastered everywhere, to wall-size ones for viewing video. The smaller ones, says Weiser, are “where you’ll plan your grocery list or do your homework. They’ll be the equivalent of Post-it notes on the refrigerator or the crumpled-up notepaper in your pocket.”
In a decade, every phone will have a screen on it.
Much content will be developed under service contracts. A supplier will create high-value content, such as a market-research study directly for a paying customer (or a limited set of customers). Newspapers and online news services will pay reporters and editors to produce content, which will then be sold cheaply in conjunction with advertising that covers most costs; that same content may also be distributed “free” as part of a subscription service. Certainly, advertisers will continue to pay people to develop advertising content for them, even if that content is to be distributed free.
Advertising has a poor reputation in many quarters because most advertising is designed for a broad market. But in the one-to-one world the Net promises, advertising will often be tailored and of higher quality. Those with more money to spend will get higher-quality advertising.
In the new communities of the Net, the intrinsic value of content generally will remain high, but most individual items will have a short commercial half-life. Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid. Creativity will proliferate, but quality will be scarce and hard to recognize. The problem for providers of intellectual property in the future is this: Although under law they will be able to control the pricing of their own products, they will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number.
We are being shoved up against futurity with such violence that science fiction may become a historical term … The Internet may be important because we are seeing something akin to what we did when we invented cities.