“New forms of getting in touch with ourselves and sharing information will emerge.” PCs will enable video-phoning to replace telephoning and give us unprecedented access to all forms of information through powerful networks. The bottom line: “We’ll have more flexibility and power” to simply enjoy life.
Maybe whenever a person does decide to buy anything, a site could ask him to please post a review of the experience with the Internet Better Business Bureau Web page.
Physically, you are very much here today and gone tomorrow, while cyberspace has become the anchor of your career and the linchpin of your reality. In 15 years, that will be a very common sentiment, so common that it will no longer seem odd or even remarkable.
Basically computers are going to become our televisions. They will be really big, cheap screens as flat as pancakes, and they’re going to [have] fun digital imagery, plus interlaced NTSC, plus PAL, plus SECAM, Cinerama, Super Panavision, Cinemascope plus video record and playback, all at the same time, probably in a series of windows. It won’t be fancy interactive television with a lot of button-pushing. It’s gonna be the “I Love Lucy Show” and “Dallas” but grabbed faster, and if you pay enough you’ll be allowed to fast-forward through the really unbearably stupid parts.
Current trends in communications are leading toward a head-on collision between global networking and national governmental authority. At the moment a “twilight of sovereignty” scenario looks plausible and the situation definitely does not favor governments. Given current political instability worldwide, it’s going to be a lot easier to make governments look like computer networks than it is to make the computer revolution the handmaiden of traditional governments. I make no judgment as to whether this is good or bad. After the revolution things will be different – not better, just different
As the non-academic world wants to get online, there will remain a need for new services and user interfaces. Even with these changes, the Internet will remain an extremely cost-effective way for individuals, educational institutions, and companies to communicate globally.
Financial transactions will probably remain a relatively small portion of Internet traffic for a few years because of concerns about security. Potential commercial service use includes databases, electronic shopping malls, and on-demand entertainment.
Soon the backbone will upgrade to gigabyte speeds, enough to send real-time uncompressed video or a complete encyclopedia in a few seconds. Additional bandwidth will accommodate the increasing number of users, and allow for additional services.
Fully-interactive, on-demand multimedia applications will be available through the Internet. In addition to widespread shopping and banking services, the Internet is the medium of choice for business video conferences, medical applications, and remote operation of household devices.
There will be 100 million U.S. Internet users by the end of the decade, and … there will be tens of millions more users abroad. “You have to imagine that this kind of reaching out from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world, at your fingertips, has got to change the way we think about our world”