It is possible that Mosaic and its progeny could quickly become the standard front end for the Internet … As the software improves and modem speeds increase, full-page layouts with color graphics, animations, film clips, automated product ordering and many other features will become commonplace. Using Mosaic for video-on-demand and set-top-box interactive television is also a likely possibility.
Schools, now among the most intellectually barren of our institutions, would become true learning centers, linked to information resources throughout the world. Teachers, the nation’s only professionals who are routinely deprived of telephones at their workplaces, would be in close contact with both colleagues and vast amounts of data, enabling them to grow intellectually, and in doing so, model life-long learning for their students. And the students, now condemned to serving time in schools that all too often resemble prisons, would have access to a substantial portion of the world’s potential mentors and potential friends.
Telecomputing … can become an agent of educational reform, a kind of Trojan horse that quietly but thoroughly rearranges classrooms.
Trends shaping technical communicators’ skill sets … involve increasing human-computer interaction in the form of more online, multimedia and Internet activity, as well as more subject-specific and specialized sets of knowledge.
The Internet promises to achieve what no charter of rights can: putting printing presses in the hands of many. In a world dominated by powerful unitary, publishing conglomerates, it offers a potent antidote to the corruption such power inevitably brings: a new mode of communication by many to many. Greater government power to censor such a medium is the last thing any democrat should endorse.
Computers were feared, would be the Big Brother’s tool, instruments of oppression, invaders of privacy, displacers of persons. All those dangers are still with us, and all those fears. The use of bar codes and scanners poses great challenges to a free society. But up until now, at least, computers have shown themselves to be capable of empowering people in ways we did not foresee 20 years ago.
Just as happened with copy protection of software, the technological battle between censors and circumventors will ebb and flow. Who knows how it will turn out? My hunch is that the decentralized structure of the Internet, and the sheer quantum of data flow probably gives the circumventors a long-term edge.
The Net has no center. It is a web of interconnected nodes. A serendipitious result of this structure is that the Net resists censorship.
The display might turn into a metaphoric music store. By touching the pictures of various shelves, one could browse through a stack of compact disks. Touching one CD icon might trigger a wireless call to the record company – and the response would be a brief snippet of one of the songs on the CD. A button with a picture of a package might flash at that point, and if you touched it, the disk would arrive at your house the next day, billed to your bank account.
The Internet’s unique, many-to-many mode of communication should be a powerful democratizing force. Oppressed groups should think twice about endorsing greater powers of censorship for state authorities, since such powers seem likely to be used against them.