Web servers may add features to support online communities in the future and come to be a valuable part of online community. At that point they will no longer be Web servers as we know them today, but a kind of bulletin board software system.
What might we say … of a time when super-fast computers, singly and together, generate and sustain totally absorbing visual worlds, populated and teeming with avatars and scoundrels and gigantic, dizzying databases tilting like drunken electric pyramids…when, in the silicon banks of machines whirring in stuffy rooms there breathe whole alternative cities, the sites of a delirious new urbanism entire?
As a reporter of the future, I am going to know exactly how many folks read each of my pieces. Chances are, the newspaper will be collecting miniscule fees each time someone reads it – two-, five-, ten-cent digital cash stipends for each article. I probably won’t see more than a third to a half of that.
[Expectations include] A network for the exchange of information for industry, governments, public authorities and users … the establishment of international links among existing high-speed data networks in various industrialized countries … access to distance-learning facilities and various sources of knowledge by interconnecting educational institutions, small business resource centers and other institutions … an advanced infrastructure for the interconnection of libraries that will provide an open and global platform for access, manipulation and circulation of digitized information in many forms … the interoperation of networks for open multimedia access to major museums and galleries … infrastructure and information management technologies to address key environmental and natural resource issues of relevance to both developed and developing nations.
Seems to me that the choice of guaranteeing against government ability … to conduct wiretaps … probably is a choice for anarchy, a choice for more authority and more opportunity for criminals, and I don’t think that on the whole, looking around at our society, that we need too many choices of that kind.
I don’t think it’s going to be very long before health care reform, tax cuts and foreign policy are debated on the Internet. The 1996 presidential campaign will be an enormous catalyst for that process.
It is a little terrifying, at times, to think that virtually anyone, armed simply with a computer, modem and telephone line, can, at least in theory, reach a worldwide audience with whatever communication he or she wishes. This fact, coupled with the anarchic freedom of the Internet, has brought to a head a number of fundamental issues that may have significant ramifications on how the Information Age unfolds: surveillance and public safety vs. privacy through encryption and anonymity, censorship vs. free expression, more control vs. a decentralized anarchy of information.
Will the development of cyberspace precipitate a migration away from the crime-ridden big cities back to rural living, a trend which would greatly affect state and local planning? This is possible if people are able to send their children off each morning to a virtual school or university and then report to work in a virtual office.
We will see the rise of the virtual salesperson who makes calls to businesses and homes in some fashion over the global Net. These things are predictable because new technologies tend first to be used to do familiar tasks more cheaply and easily.
Business meetings will increasingly take place in cyberspace, involving participants scattered across the global marketplace. Scientists and researchers on different continents will probably work jointly on projects with a degree of collaboration that is unrealistic today.