Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn – It’s Popular, Pervasive and Surprisingly Perverse, According to the First Survey of Online Erotica. And There’s No Way to Stamp it Out

Pornography is powerful stuff, and as long as there is demand for it, there will always be a supply. Better software tools may help check the worst abuses, but there will never be a switch that will cut it off entirely – not without destroying the unbridled expression that is the source of the Internet’s (and democracy’s) greatest strength.

The Meaning of Digital Life: Publishers Sell Remedies for Computer-Age Angst

Guys like Negroponte predict the end of mass production, but they never say what happens to the masses. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological change has destroyed jobs, but also created many more new ones. This time, that will not happen. Nations should cope by adopting a 30-hour workweek, tax credits for volunteer work and other measures.

The Meaning of Digital Life: Publishers Sell Remedies for Computer-Age Angst

Once all forms of media – text, voice and video – are in the digital lingua franca, the structure and economics of the information and entertainment industries are totally transformed. And in the future, the real gap in society will not be between rich and poor, but between the old and the young, who are fluent with digital tools like personal computers and online communication … Technology will not only make people better off materially but also “be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.”

Creating a Giant Computer Highway

Traced in the phosphors glowing on the screen of his computer, Robert E. Kahn sees the 21st century: Hair-thin strands of glass fiber are threaded through computerized libraries to supercomputers, large high-resolution video screens and hundreds of thousands of computer work stations located throughout the country … Such a national network – an information infrastructure … much like a national highway system for data – would make it possible to ship enormous amounts of information back and forth at what are called gigabit speeds (billions of bits of data per second), almost a thousand times faster than anyone using today’s fastest electronic networks.