A new industry is being created in America. We are beginning to create massive Data Libraries …. No one place will contain the information. Rather all information sources are being made available in electronic form through the Internet.
Educators and policy makers currently see technology as a replacement for people. This is not true. Rather, as John Naisbett said, we can and must have High-Tech and High-Touch at the same time.
We should have learning centers, neighborhood electronic cottages.
A telecommunications network that links students together and that supports everything from data to video exchange would take education out of isolated classrooms, allowing computer-based systems to be set up at home, in local businesses, and at new community-based learning centers around Colorado.
Lyell has plans for an educational system where students are treated as individuals with differing interests and learning skills. He hopes to build interactive learning devices that students can peruse at their own pace and that present information in a variety of ways. “In the case of education, it means a student is able to log onto a computer to learn about whatever he or she is interested in learning about at that particular point in time.”
In Ed Lyell’s hopeful vision of the near future, by age 18 everyone in this country is literate, semi-skilled and as comfortable using computers and telecommunications technology as they are using pencils … “It would be easier to get the Pope to become a Buddhist than to get the schools to change.”
The information superhighway holds the promise of an information explosion that will enhance our marketplace of ideas and bring untold benefits to all our citizens. But this promise will be an empty one unless people are assured that when they go online or talk on the phone, they are not forfeiting important fundamental rights, like their right to privacy.
Before American citizens and potential customers of American computer and telecommunications products will see this as the solution to privacy and security concerns, they must be assured that ironclad procedures are in place to guarantee that, absent a court order, no one will be able to decode their private communications, except the recipient they choose. Otherwise, even law-abiding users will not want to use encryption devices with Clipper Chip.
Objectionable material would be a tiny fraction of the vast materials available on the Internet. What we should protect is one of the greatest experiments we have seen in our age of the Internet, where you have everything from the things you find most valuable to things you might find boring or repulsive.
Let us not close down 99.9 percent of the Internet because of a few child pornographers. Go after them, but protect the Internet for the rest of the people.