The private sector won’t gamble on such a risky investment. Even if it did, he says, it would build not a superhighway available to all but rather a kind of private toll road open only to a business and scientific elite.
A world populated only by lurkers would be as empty as a ghost town, like a neutron-bombed Vegas with lights blazing and no visitors…but worse: the night air would have eyes … A virtual world consisting of living representations of real people and with a bare minimum of architecture would fare better than a virtual world in which the reverse was the case.
Creators of cyberspaces have control over the direction of virtual gravity, and there are interactions to be considered between this direction and the direction of real gravity (after all, the traveller’s body is still here, in a chair) especially when major virtual body movement is involved such as flight, shrinkage, rotation, and braking. Indeed, the larger problem of motion sickness, which is the conflict between optical and inner-ear motion-information to the brain, might never be fully solved.
The Internet is now in the middle of a transition to a full consumer network. Nobody planned it. It’s thoroughly out of control. And that’s a good thing.
By the time the new fiber-and-coaxial networks are built, the thinking goes, many people will be used to getting data from Mosaic. As a result, they’ll demand that the software also control what comes into the home via the cable systems.
[Clipper] will make computer-based communication routinely safe and private in a way that gives us a fighting chance of keeping our ability to spy on criminals.
As today’s cyberspaces – the space of the telephone, e-mail, MUDs, video-conferences, interactive TV and on-line data services – coalesce with today’s arcade – and museum-grade virtual worlds, logics will emerge that are informed by the reality coded into our bodies: the topo-logic, that is, of 4 million years of natural evolution as well as the mytho-logic of 100,000 years of human cultural evolution, layered upon the topo-logic and constrained by it.
It’s the beginning of the model for browsing for the print media. Then it will be converted to the electronic media. It will do audio; then you will be able to initiate a videoconference. Ultimately, I wonder if in some sense it won’t even become the interface for the telephone. Not that phones will go away, but your display will be on the wall. It will be the display for watching anything, even for computer stuff. We’ll have one billion instructions per second in a laptop soon, then in TVs. So what is a TV? It becomes a thing with digital processing, with a chip – programmable. How do you program it? However you want! This may take five, seven or 10 years … The PC and its derivatives will end up being the core of future consumer devices, and it is the de facto standard computer.
E-mail alone will keep driving the Internet’s growth. E-mail’s turned out to be the killer app. My definition of being on the Internet is having an Internet e-mail address.
The more widespread and grassroots the Internet, the more difficult it will be to dominate and control it. You can contribute directly to the humanizing of the wires by telling your story, adding your persona to the unaffiliated.