This is true survival of the best news-delivery agent, and it’s about time. Either the people who read us will decide we have something special and buy in but good, or they will do it themselves and our word processors will flash blankly. So be it. These new demands can offer information delivery a bracing restorative.
To achieve consensus at an international level is hard, but it becomes even harder when the participants in the debate are unequal in their ability to participate … Information flow is mostly unidirectional, i.e. to developing countries, rather than from them … While not a panacea, e-mail and related technologies can help alleviate these problems to a significant degree.
We expect within the next six months AT&T will be well on its way to becoming the dominant Internet access provider. No one else can match their reach and their ability to target business and residential customers.
We could do absolutely whatever we pleased on the Net, perfectly confident that none of it would have any consequences in the real world – the world where people have real jobs, go broke, get sued, get elected, get fired, and so forth. All of this is changing, of course, and I think that a lot of the shock and horror that these changes are evoking have their origin in this particular kind of relationship to the world – privileged yet detached, central yet isolated, plugged in yet disconnected.
Every community learns its own way of carrying on conversations in several media at once, and every individual comes to terms with the digital dimension of his or her social identity in his or her own particular way, with particular strategies born of the thousand kinds of creativity and agency that opportunity and adversity nurture within us. In the end, all of us become – indeed, all of us already were – hybrids, or cyborgs in Donna Haraway’s vocabulary, living our lives in many spaces at once.
Maybe we can become more democratic by learning how to use e-mail as part of running our organizations.
The direction we’re going in and that the commercial services are going in is that it will all wind up together on the Web.
Computer network experts argue that the Internet is also a technology that can change the nature of communication, often leading to more intimate and compulsive exchanges of information that would occur, say, by writing letters or chatting on the phone … It is the prospect of tapping into this much-discussed special nature of the Net – as computer networks are generically known – that really excites some business people. More than just a tool, they view the Internet as a vast marketplace of the future, changing the way people shop and spend. Yet this brave new commercial world is mostly hope and hype so far.
If you’re not an active Internet citizen by the mid-1990s, you’re likely to be out of business by the year 2000.
Net commerce can offer much lower prices than physical stores and even stores selling through catalogs, because the core marketing and transaction costs are so much less … Directories are one of the few site-promotion strategies that don’t cost much, if anything, and will persuade people to start shopping in cyberspace in the first place. That’s why directory development is worth watching closely.