Advances in software and hardware seem to force writers to be editors, editors to be designers, and designers to try all three, four hours before the issue goes out. Maybe the online, organic news connection can move beyond that, giving us a channel for pure news delivery, through a vehicle of incredible flexibility and power.
While a changeover to largely e-mail-based communication can bring about almost revolutionary change in the functioning of an organization, it does require a significant shift in attitude and style of working, a process that is insufficiently understood.
E-mail cannot replace face-to-face meetings in the process of consensus-building and decision-making. E-mail, news groups, etc. one can opt out of. A meeting compels attention. What e-mail does do is prepare the ground – exchange of views, internal discussion, etc. can prune the agenda down to the really thorny issues: no time is wasted.
Ultimately, the communication possibilities offered by the Web can’t help but change human relationships. People no longer might identify with a physical neighborhood for companionship or advice; they can turn to a cyberspace neighborhood, based on mutual interests and association, as a source for support and information.
If network activity becomes a major form of human communication, people may associate more freely online because they are not slowed by geographical or temporal limits. How will our institutions (government, education, religious) change to accommodate these new associations? … If people can create their own group identity in the form of network-based alliances, how will this change offline institutions?
By removing the link between advertising and access to the media and by subsidizing community groups to create voices at the grassroots level, the social spaces needed for a vibrant, egalitarian, public sphere could be greatly enlarged. Individuals would more easily understand their world, their connection to their community, and the government and corporate actions that shape their lives.
Attitudes favor interpreting the world along the lines of rapid change, networks of individuals, finely-calibrated meritocracy, individualism, privatization, and a dismissal of collective goods. These attitudes provide little resistance to the erosion of the remaining public sphere.
A strict liability rule would stifle the development of hybrid-publishing environments.
Demoting reading from its privileged position in the school curriculum is only one of many consequences of Knowledge Machines … What follows from imagining a Knowledge Machine is a certainty that school will either change very radically or simply collapse. It is predictable that the education establishment cannot see farther than using new technologies to do what it has always done in the past, teach the same curriculum … The possibility of freely exploring worlds of knowledge calls into question the very idea of an administered curriculum.
Telephone companies, cable companies and anyone else in the wire business should beware. Copper and glass are all very well, but the most important wires are still the ones etched in silicon.