European versions of AOL could be up in Germany, England, and France by the end of the year. Case and company are currently looking for a partner of similar stature to expand into Asia.
By the end of next year, Case expects AOL to become the online industry’s first billion-dollar company.
What the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication, and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed – one which appeared to be natural – about the effects of technology.
The dark horse looming over everything is the Internet itself, which some say has the potential to doom not just AOL, but all the proprietary services, to the ash heap of online history.
These days, it seems like everyone with a server and a modem is … greedily eyeing the Great UnWired, envisioning humongous dollar signs. Analysts project the commercial online market will grow to 10 million people by the end of 1995.
While there is no doubt that the Internet folds into existing social functions and extends them in new ways – translating the act of shopping, for example, into an electronic form – what are far more cogent as possible long-term political effects of the Internet are the ways in which it institutes new social functions, ones that do not fit easily within those of characteristically modern organizations. The problem is that these new functions can only become intelligible if a framework is adopted that does not limit the discussion from the outset to modern patterns of interpretation.
Case sees online services evolving over the next decade into a mass medium engaging tens of millions of people, for whom logging on will become as much a part of everyday life as making a phone call. And he’s determined to transform AOL into flashy, interactive multimedia that will lead the way.
This summer, more than 3 million Americans were sending e-mail, arguing in forums, flirting in chat rooms, and wandering the Net on AOL, with thousands more signing up every day. The service expects to have more than 5 million subscribers online next year.
What is at stake in e-mail (and all electronic writing) is precisely a reconfiguration of the matter/spirit, human/machine relation, a change that I see as having enormous consquence on the (re)construction of the subject and cultural change in general … We have a new relation of human and machine, a new structure of decentralized interaction and a completely new space/time complex. Surely this apparatus emerges within capitalism and within a terrorist state system; surely it is not all equally distributed in the U.S., much less the world; surely it affords voice to some very nasty forms of sexism and racism – the detritus of the modern world. Yet in so many ways it upset the normative configuration of modern institutions, practices and cultures that it must be regarded as providing an opening, a space of transformation, without in any sense “guaranteeing” the arrival of utopia or even serious improvement upon the current order.
E-mail may substitute for the post office and the word processor for the typewriter (as the typewriter did for the pen) but only to some degree and in the end not at all … Electronic communication machines reconfigure space and time coordinates, restructure the relation of the body and mind to the practice (of writing), redesign relations of inside and outside through what I call the wrappings of language. In these ways the conditions of culture are shifted.