Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) activities will demonstrate feasible solutions to problems of national importance, such as health care or 21st century manufacturing, using the full potential of the nation’s rapidly evolving high-performance communications and information-processing capabilities.
The Nextnet could offer better hypertext links to tame the chaos of the World Wide Web and download video and software long before flying toasters arrive.
One contender, the Gigabit Testbed Initiative, envisions billion-bit-per-second wires. Ways to connect and manage such capacity are now being tested at five sites across the country. Or the signals could be carried by phone lines or TV cables. But there’s a dark horse. Utilities are thinking of installing “information pipes” into homes to carry electronic signals that would control peak power demand.
We have in the Internet the seeds of this [next network] … What people want, and what people do, will shape what comes next.
In our education process we teach this blind faith in technology. We need to basically present the antitechnology viewpoint as reasonable. That we should look at [technology] with an incredibly critical eye. Just because we can do X, Y, Z, doesn’t mean we should do X, Y, Z.
We will someday see the [cyber]species that we make as being as beautiful as a butterfly … Our chief chore is taking on the duties and responsibilities of gods … I believe technology is unadulteratedly good in our world, just as life is good on our planet.
I’m the goddamn wannabe Luddite who wonders what America will look like if every rich person has a sprawling compound in some gloriously beautiful – and ecologically fragile – state like Utah while cities are abandoned to the poor. And yet, I’m actually living the “electronic cottage” dream of the Gilders, Gingriches and Tofflers. I’m turning on, logging in and crashing out here in my own little nest. I’m a “prosumer” in the infoweb, absorbing great gobs of data and disgorging a little of my own every day … I’m human, a social animal. I’m not a god, I’m a hairless chimp with a messianic complex and a mouse. I need human contact and simple pleasures. I need to eat, poop and see people smile … But instead of returning to the basics, I, like many of us, am spending more and more of my time with my face bathed in monitorglow, getting my fix of digital junk. Won’t someone please unwire me before it’s too late?
Everything you ever wanted to do, you’ll be able to do. You want to be a jaguar in the jungle? They’ll put your brain on a chip, put it in the jaguar and boom! There will be no limits, man! None.
[Online and print media will coexist] for the forseeable future and maybe even forever … It ain’t an all-or-nothing proposition.
Newspapers will thrive if editors know how to make the news relevant, urgent and fast. “All journalists are constantly endangered if they don’t change every day.”