Over time, there will be more and more people on the Internet with the time and wisdom for it to become a web of human knowledge and assistance. The 30 million members of the American Association of Retired Persons, for example, constitute a collective experience that is currently untapped. Making just that enormous body of knowledge and wisdom accessible to young minds could close with generation gap with a few keystrokes.
Today kids are getting the opportunity to be street-smart on the Internet, where children are heard and not seen. Ironically, reading and writing will benefit. Children will read and write on the Internet to communicate, not just to complete some abstract and artificial exercise. What I am advocating should not be construed as anti-intellectual or as a disdain for abstract reasoning – it is quite the opposite. The Internet provides a new medium for reaching out to find knowledge and meaning.
E-mail can be a terrific medium for reporters. E-mail interviews are both less intrusive and allow for more reflection. I am convinced that e-interviews will become a terrific medium and a standard tool for a large amount of journalism around the world – if only reporters can learn some digital decorum.
When e-mail started during the middle and late [19]60s, relatively few people were computer literate. Therefore, it is not surprising that e-mail was dramatically overtaken by fax in the 1980s … But today, with computer ubiquity, the advantages of e-mail are overwhelming, as evidenced by its skyrocketing use. Beyond the digital benefits, e-mail is a more conversational medium. While it is not spoken dialogue, it is much closer to speaking than writing … Over time, people will find different styles of usage … In all likelihood, in the next millennium e-mail (by no means limited to ASCII) will be the dominant interpersonal telecommunications medium, approaching if not overshadowing voice within the next 15 years. We will all be using e-mail, provided we all learn some digital decorum.
The user community of the Internet will be in the mainstream of everyday life. Its demographics will look more and more like the demographics of the world itself … The true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than a short cut to every book in the Library of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social fabric.
When a delivery system that looks more like the Internet is used in the general world of entertainment, the planet becomes a single media machine … In the next few decades, bits that describe other bits, tables of contents, indexes, and summaries will proliferate in digital broadcasting … The result will be a bit stream with so much header information that you computer really can help you deal with the massive amounts of content … The bits about the bits change broadcasting totally. They give you a handle by which to grab what interests you and provide the network with a means to ship them into any nook or cranny that wants them. The networks will finally learn what networking is about.
On the Net each person can be an unlicensed TV station … Every home movie won’t be a prime-time experience (thank God). But we can now think of mass media as a great deal more than high-production-value, professional TV … In the near future, individuals will be able to run electronic video serves in the same way that 57,000 Americans run computer bulletin boards … In a few years you can learn how to make couscous from Julia Child or a Moroccan housewife. You can discover wines with Robert Parker or a Burgundian vintner.
In the future digital media there will be more pay-per-view, not just on an all-or-nothing basis, but more like newspapers and magazines, where you share the cost with advertisers. In some cases, the consumer may have an option to receive material without advertising but at a higher cost. In other cases, the advertising will be so personalized that it is indistinguishable from news. It is news … The “prime” of prime time will be its quality in our eyes, not those of some collective and demographic mass of potential buyers of a new luxury car or dishwashing detergent.
With the possible exception of sports and elections, technology suggests that TV and radio of the future will be delivered asynchronously … On-demand information will dominate digital life. We will ask explicitly and implicitly for what we want, when we want it. This is require a radical rethinking of advertiser-supported programing.
If I really could look out the electronic window of my living room in Boston and see the Alps, hear the cowbells, and smell the (digital) manure in summer, in a way I am very much in Switzerland. If instead of going to work by driving my atoms into town, I log into my office and do my work electronically, exactly where is my workplace? In the future we will have telecommunications and virtual-reality technologies for a doctor in Houston to perform a delicate operation on a patient in Alaska … In the post-information age, since you may live and work at one or many locations, the concept of an “address” now takes on a new meaning.