The Media Business: Seeing the Future of Print in a Universe Gone Digital
The idea that all this information will be out in cyberspace and people will select what they want is insane.
Archives: Expert Predictions
The Media Business: Seeing the Future of Print in a Universe Gone Digital
Online services will coexist with print for the foreseeable future and maybe forever … It isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition we are facing.
Making a Difference: A Passion for Networking
The highway, using fiber optics, may someday carry a wide range of computer information and advanced television services to businesses, research centers, schools and homes. Many technology experts argue that such a network is vital if the country is to remain competitive in the next century.
The Network of All Networks
General-purpose users may eventually outnumber the computer experts who now dominate the system, and they are gaining access in rapid numbers.
Building the Information Marketplace
Many of the expensive elements of the infrastructure – the long-distance fibers and the computers – are already in place. So too are the tens of millions of potential users. The key ingredients needed are coordination and cooperation. These resources are arguably harder to come by than money, however, and may become the Achilles’ heel of the NII … The responsibility for this much-needed coordination must fall upon the federal government, whose purpose, lest we forget, is to worry about common issues that are critical to the nation. The government should undertake the first step toward the NII.
Building the Information Marketplace
With the ability to mix sound, text and video, newspapers and TV news programs would evolve into richer, multimedia presentations.
Building the Information Marketplace
With HDTV and high-quality sound flowing easily over the NII, home recreation would take a different form … vendors would offer music and video rentals over the NII. Not only would this system be cheaper for individuals … but it would also bring to our ears and eyes an entertainment library thousands if not millions of times richer than any we might own. Artists, too, would be more fairly compensated for their creations, having royalties credited to them automatically.
Building the Information Marketplace
The NII’s ability to support cooperative work across space and time would also allow more people to work at home. Parents, disabled individuals or simply people who prefer to live in a different locale from their place of employment could work with others on all kinds of office tasks … Telecommuting will become more attractive with the NII that carries high-quality pictures, sounds, and other work-related information faster and more faithfully than today’s phone network.
Building the Information Marketplace
Legal, governmental, medical and … nearly every service that uses paper today could do business via the NII … The process of moving around the paper forms and letters that constitute business mail, for example, consumes tens of billions of dollars annually.
Building the Information Marketplace
The NII would make practical another kind of national treasure – a digital library of active knowledge that would combine text, sound and video in interactive formats.