Iway Frenzy Reaches Summit; Is the Next Phase All Downhill?

Is Internet the Iway [information highway]? No. Iways will be multimedia, not ASCII-bound like the TCP/IP Internet. The Internet can carry video over TCP/IP, sure, just like dogs can walk on their hind legs. TCP/IP zealots are saying that ATM is fine as long as it carries TCP/IP, but that’s getting old. Where are the next-generation cell-based protocols, operating systems, and applications needed to exploit ATM so the Internet can go multimedia? TCP/IP’s recently announced that next generation, if ever implemented, will turn out be too little too late.

Electronic Superhighway, with Federal Backing, Contains Seeds for Future

With the rapidly falling cost of powerful computers and bandwidth for communications, a National Information Infrastructure looks like an affordable federal investment with a potentially huge return.

The Myth of Cyber Inequality: Computers Are Not Causing Growing Wage Differences

Contrary to Gingrich and Gore, the Internet is not the promised land. Sure, our economic and social well-being would improve if some of our worst workers had better skills; but the skills they need most are basic literacy and good work habits. With those, computer competence will come if needed. The infatuation with computers as a cause or cure of social distress is misplaced. Mostly, computers mirror who we are: a people of vast vitality, great ingenuity and manifest imperfections.

The Myth of Cyber Inequality: Computers Are Not Causing Growing Wage Differences

Perhaps within a decade most Americans will have an e-mail address just as most now have phone numbers. The computer will become (as it is already becoming) a democratic appliance that will increasingly resemble the kitchen stove. Almost everyone has a stove. But some of us make hamburgers, and others make fettucini. Computers are the same; they reveal differences more than they create them.

Lost On The Information Superhighway: It’s a Lot of Hoopla. No One Yet Knows Where It’s Going

Today’s new communications technologies gush uncertainty. Cable and phone companies are forming alliances to compete with each other. Everyone aims to steal everyone else’s business. And strive to rewrite communications laws to their advantage. No one really knows what customers want. Some new technologies will predictably have unpredictable uses. We won’t know what they are until the systems are built; but the systems may not get built until we have a better idea of their uses. We are on the threshold of something; we just don’t know what or when.

The Internet in Canada

Pundits, executives, special interest groups, corporations and politicians will talk about the information highway in terms that will make it appear that it will magically cure all of Canada’s economic ills. Yet, few of these people will have learned how to leverage the global knowledge found within the Internet. Few of them will understand what the highway is or can be, while purporting to represent us in its development.

Lost On The Information Superhighway: It’s a Lot of Hoopla. No One Yet Knows Where It’s Going

In every age there are millions of people like me – who are vying to be last to have whatever is new and allegedly better. Who has time for all the multimedia, interactive mumbo-jumbo? We will join the wave of the future only after it laps gently onto shore. Let others enjoy the pleasures of digging their Model T out of the mud.