The marriage of the computer and instant communications promises to bring citizens unparalleled access to – and influence over – their government. But skeptics warn it will bring an electronic mob into city hall, overwhelming officials with diverse demands and undermining representative democracy.
A couple would buy a Swatch watch. And a couple would go eat some shrimp. And Carnival became a multibillion-dollar company. We have the opportunity to become the Carnival Cruise Lines of this environment.
The mediation has become so intense that the things mediated can no longer even pretend to be unaffected. The culture is increasingly simulational in the sense that the media often changes the things that it treats, transforming the identity of originals and referentialities. In the second media age, “reality” becomes multiple.
Remember AOL’s erstwhile partner Commodore? Ten years ago, it was the largest home PC company in the United States; today, it’s the answer to a trivia question. Will AOL be able to avoid a similar fate? Can it withstand the Microsoft juggernaut? Will its strategy of co-opting the Internet work?
Every time we make any sort of transaction in the digital environment, we smear our fingerprints all over Cyberspace. If we are to have any privacy in the future, we will need virtual “walls” made of cryptography.
Nation states are at a loss when faced with a global communication network. Technology has taken a turn that defies the character of power of modern governments.
Unless the Hispanics get involved with technology, they’re going to be more marginalized in the information age than they are today in the industrial age. They will be no better off than the immigrants who came in from Europe and lost their culture by moving into sweatshops.
When you look ahead 10 years from now, probably most of our subscribers will be connecting to us several times a day, from several different locations, with several different access devices, on several different communications devices. It will become part of their life.
Vast inequalities of use exist, changing the democratic structure of the Internet into an occasion for further wrongs to the poorer populations. Even within the high-use nations, wealthy white males are disproportionate users. Yet technologies sometimes spread quickly and the Internet is relatively cheap. Only grassroots political mobilization on this issue will ensure wide access.
Multimedia is set to become an even bigger component of the service as AOL moves to faster pipes … Case believes the effort to free AOL from the tyranny of the telephone line is crucial to building interactive services into a mass medium.