Elon University

Topic: Communication

Senate Heads for Cyberspace

The Internet opens up lines of communication with persons who might not otherwise contact their representatives. It saves taxpayers time and money by allowing correspondence to take place electronically, bypassing the cost of stamps and paper and the time necessary to go through the postal service. My hope for the future is that access to the Internet continues to spread to every classroom, university, home and office. It truly is the wave of the future and California must seize this opportunity to stay in the forefront of the revolution.

A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

“Dialing” itself, in fact, is likely to be a vastly different experience when such services arrive in the next century. Rather than pecking at numbers on a telephone keypad, it is likely that a telephone caller will simply use a remote control to point at an icon on the television screen. The call might be audio only, or it could include full-motion video, if the two – or more – parties agree.

A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

The truly successful new information services, some experts say, may go beyond traditional television programming and consumerism. “It’s very easy to envisage a time when video communication will be the most natural way to communicate,” said Nathan Myhrvold, a senior vice president at the Microsoft Corporation, who is in charge of developing the software company’s interactive television business. What will be possible when “video dial tone” is widely available in every American home? For one thing, some industry executives predict, there will be a proliferation of video cameras throughout society, permitting people to dial into the network and peek virtually everywhere.

The Internet, Your Company and You

Hopefully within one year, definitely within three, no users (or program) should ever have to send passwords over the Internet in sniffable cleartext … We should be able to make financial commitments safely and securely – the ability to insert our credit card numbers securely within encrypted e-mail and to authenticate remote service use and product purchases charged to our accounts

They Made the Web Spun Round the World

The technology for a secure Web already exists. But we are manacled at the moment by U.S. export controls and encryption issues. I can’t speak for the whole W3 consortium, but when you look at designing a worldwide system, trying to limit the use of cryptography won’t work. I’m very much aware of the government’s worry about abuse of privacy. But my personal opinion is that the effort to prohibit [encryption] is becoming untenable.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

I don’t think that Flaubert, for example, could have written the way he did on a screen. In the move to on-line communication, the aspiration to the kind of style that seeks a sort of permanence, symbolized by immobile words on a page, vanishes. Okay, no big deal, except that I also believe that language is our evolutionary wonder. It is our marvel. If we’re going to engage the universe, comprehend it and penetrate it, it will be through ever more refined language. The screen is a linguistic leveling device.

What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications

The word that is incised on a page in a book has to be put there by a large institution. Sitting between the author of that word and the reader of that word is a huge mediating organism made up of organization and capital. And all that mediation has a great effect on that word. But between the word that I type into my computer and e-mail to you and the word that comes out on your end there’s nothing but the digital transformation taking place. It is not mediated. It’s as intimate as it possibly could be without me whispering it into your ear.