The people who did best in television democracy are likely to do worst under the glare of the telephone. In the age of telephone democracy our politicians are going to grow more polite. Their voices are going to grow smaller, and their ears bigger.
The mass media will rapidly lose the vast political power they have exercised for so long. Power will move into constantly shifting communities of shopkeepers, housewives, Yale bulldogs, fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, nature-cure quacks, pacifists and phesbian leminists.
The machines behind the network can tally national opinion not only instantaneously but with a level of delicate precision that would have left Jefferson breathless.
The Internet is very dynamic. With the right concept, a company on the Internet will be as powerful as a CNN or an NBC. You’re going to see companies like Quicken that are going to create business services for the Internet. There are hundreds of people right now literally in their garages, working on shoestrings on some great products.
Interactive entertainment brings “on-demand” movies and interactive games into your living room, and your children get straight A’s in school as they travel around the world on the Information Superhighway, gathering information for reports and taking courses from teachers who live thousands of miles away.
You are never “out-of-touch” as you use a smart phone to receive electronic mail messages in your car and a pocket-sized personal digital assistant when you are walking the streets of a foreign city. You stay in touch with world events and business trends with personalized electronic newspapers that contain information about subjects you have programmed into digital robots.
You must make sure the new technologies are cheap and fast. From the beginning, they must be as inexpensive as current alternatives and as fast as possible. A digital telephone line shouldn’t cost a penny more than an analog one. In fact, since analog service is actually derived from the digital guts of the telephone network digital lines should be cheaper. And yes, if you follow the law of the Microcosm, you will have to let things get out of control. Videophones will become commonplace. Remote links to offices and online services will become transparent. New and possibly dangerous unintended consequences will pop up.
People will own more than one PC – just like they have more than one phone and one TV. It’s not that much of a leap of faith.
The network of networks could enable a million human brains to interconnect and form a sort of planetary superbrain … By 2020, 12 billion machines from cardiac simulators to vehicle braking systems will be connected to the Internet.
New Media will not be the same as either cable, telephone, or PC industries. The New Media industry will be created over the next three to five years out of innumerable wild guesses, valiant tries, and spectacular flops. There is no formula for success. There is no roadmap. And there is no place to hide.