Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames – but think of your own experience: Can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Who will choose the new punctuation, the new layouts, the new indexing schemes? For good or ill, it will probably be the same kind of people who chose them after the time of Gutenberg – publishers, eager to sell … The standard-setters won’t necessarily be those with the deepest pockets. They’ll be the people who figure out how to organize, punctuate, and navigate the terabytes of information that are only milliseconds away.
Computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They’ll eat up the book budgets and require librarians who are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars … The result won’t be a library without books – it’ll be a library without value.
The future of Web browsers is fairly mundane. There’s going to be more multimedia, more types of documents, more sophisticated kinds of tags.
The Internet is too primitive to take the leap to supporting the sophisticated indexing, search-and-retrieval services that libraries use.
Society has not yet decided on a metaphor for online services. Should they be regarded as libraries, bookstores or newsstands, and thereby not be held accountable for all that passes through the wires? Or are they controllable conduits, as suggested by the civil rights office’s concept of a “limited public forum?” It’s not easy to come down on one side or the other.
Today, the volume of information being generated on the Internet seems to greatly exceed the ability of any one organization that attempts to categorize all Web pages and other resources. Although there will surely continue to be broad categorizations of Internet resources, a large number of narrower indexes, sometimes called “virtual libraries,” is likely to emerge.
Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you’ll ever find on a computer screen.
There are and will be problems with digital publishing on the Internet, problems that will call for fresh new goods and services. Or, in business terms, there are market segments emerging and fortunes to be made.