The future offers users the ability to see as well as hear each other. Both sets of grandparents can simultaneously share home videos of grandchildren. Or, international members of a photography club can share experiences and images in real time.
The more concretely new information services can be designed, and the more they can be linked to tangible and familiar activities, the easier it will be for consumers to comprehend their value. Positioning attempts have already entered the vernacular, such as “electronic mail,” “electronic banking” and “telecommuting.” Of course, real benefits must ensue from such services for them to make the great leap into the mainstream.
A 500-channel cable system will surely deliver unfathomable and boundless mediocrity. And with more channels, production values will further decline, since there will be less money spent per program.
Experts point to the day when the NREN will provide students with interactive textbooks so that to study, say, weather patterns, they will log into a supercomputer that will visually model hurricanes or typhoons.
To build the nationwide fiber-optic network necessary for full interactive multimedia – which combines video and audio with the text and still pictures that current networks can carry – would require at least $ 325 billion, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation estimates.
Mental entrapment without physical interaction undermines social relationships, and the disorder seems to be gender-specific. We’re fostering a wave of computer widows.
Soon it will be easier to locate someone’s electronic mailbox than his or her physical address.
Bit-heads talk about digital cash, but that can only show experimental systems with fancy names like DigiCash and First Virtual. For a long while, it’s funny money … A network address isn’t associated with a physical location, so it’s open turf for fraud … network-authentication software can never give the same sense of trust as a face-to-face business transaction. No computer network with pretty graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our society work.
In the future it may be easy to send e-mail with telephone- or television-based technology.
Just by counting network nodes, the Internet is now doubling in size every year. This growth can’t continue for long – at that rate, everyone on earth will be connected in the year 2003. Impossible.