Making faster communications lines and enlarging modem pools won’t help – adding more users will only slow things down. The networks will be further clogged by flashy services like online audio, video and graphical user interfaces like the World Wide Web’s Mosaic.
According to the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA), the number of e-mail users has increased from 400,000 in 1980 to more than 30 million in 1993. The EMA predicts that there will be 50 million users by 1995.
I don’t believe that phone books, newspapers, magazines or corner video stores will disappear as computer networks spread. Nor do I think that my telephone will merge with my computer, to become some sort of information appliance.
I see a wide gulf between the real networks that I use daily and the promised land of the information infrastructure … Few aspects of daily life require computers, digital networks, or massive connectivity. They’re irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing and gossiping. You don’t need a keyboard to bake bread, play touch football, piece a quilt, build a stone wall, recite a poem or say a prayer … I’m saddened that so many accept the false promises of a hyper-hyped idea. Overpromoted, the small, intimate benefits of the Internet are being destroyed by their own success.
When it’s more intricate than the U.S. road system and it’s all over the world, can you police it? Maybe not.
The Internet planners and users hope the government also will obligate companies offering connections and other Internet services to provide service to institutions and individuals without regard to the content of communications so long as illegal activities are not involved.
In all likelihood what will happen, and what we think ought to happen [is that government will provide funds to schools] to buy access the same way you buy a telephone line. It will take 20 years to wire the whole country with fiber, and you could do this very soon.
Four years from today, every PC will be a Web server.
Is e-money really going to happen? Inevitably.
Digitizing the final mile of electronic money, where the coin and the dollar bill go the way of the vinyl LP, will make all the difference in the world. It will not only change the physical way you spend your money, it will alter the way you view your own economic being. And depending on the manner in which it is implemented, digital money might allow others to view your financial status with a decidedly discomfiting intimacy.