By monitoring public message traffic and alternative news sources from around the world, early warning of impending significant developments could be developed, in advance of more traditional means of indications and warning.
Today, we struggle to teach print literacy to people. What will the world be like when information literacy skills are needed in addition? Experts in communication today would be hard-pressed to even define Web information literacy, much less be prepared to create curriculum for a variety of educational contexts.
While the aggregate behavior of users dispersed across a network often might not cause serious bandwidth problems today, widespread patterns of bandwidth-intensive individual behavior, in extreme cases, can. What about the user who heavily accesses graphics or movies on the Web? While there may be no laws to stop this user, an agreement between the user and the Internet service provider might restrict such activity.
As the Web alters communication and information patterns, the resulting change raises issues our society must face for individual, group, and societal responsibility. Moral and legal issues will arise in the areas of individual behavior, societal responsibility for issues of access and information literacy, and the new relationships, communication, and thought patterns the Web fosters.
The Web fulfills [Vannevar] Bush’s dream of a memex in many respects. While a “universe” of knowledge is still evolving on the Web, the hypertext “trails” on Web pages are associative indexes that people save and share. The Web’s basic structure rests on Bush’s principle of associative indexing, and the flourishing of information on the Web in the last few years demonstrates its potential as a “universe of documents.”
Humans often utilize technology in far too complex and quirky ways for neat predictions to come true. While not always far-reaching in their effects on society, however, technologies have gradually and subtly changed communication patterns, relationships and expectations.
The Internet traffic carrying arguments about pornography on the Internet will during 1996 swamp the actual pornography, so even the most sophisticated Web search engines will too often fail to find any. What quicker road to collapse? So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages. I hope I’m not being too negative. Tell me if you think so.
Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of paper-based Advertising Age dismisses the current interest in online communication as “‘cyberspin’ designed to build urgency and credibility for a new technology.”
One of two bad things will happen with video over the Internet during 1996. Either the Internet’s attached computers, operating systems, and applications software will fail to deliver video, or they will succeed. If they succeed, the packet-punctuated pre-Asynchronous Transfer Mode Internet will fail to carry it. In either case, without video the Internet will lack the energy needed to sustain its current expansion.
Internet backlash among professional paranoids will break into a full collapse after a series of well-publicized privacy violations instigated by the professional paranoids themselves for our own good.