Elon University

Topic: Community/Culture

Hype List: High-Tech Outrage

Books allowed complex theories to be disseminated, TV brought titillating images of sex and violence to the home, and the Net – well, the Net seems best at spreading controversy. The last few months have seen wave after wave of outrage sweep over the Net. First it was polemics about the Pentium flaw, then it was attacks on the patented GIF algorithm, now it’s debates about IP security holes. Sure, the strength of a many-to-many medium is that it allows for grass-roots organizing, but can’t it empower us to do something other than kvetch?

Being Nicholas: Nicholas Negroponte is the Most Wired Man We Know (and That’s Saying Something)

Will we one day have robots running around who used to carry our groceries but are now hurling paving stones at us? I doubt it. I don’t foresee a time when we are treated like pets by a culture of super computers that have us on invisible leashes while we are house training ourselves walking on the grass. Hans Moravec thinks that once computers are smarter than humans, we’ll retire, and computers will become even smarter. I think the issue has more to do with consciousness and volition than being smart. Machines will be smarter than people, but I don’t believe in artificial consciousness.

Netscape’s Co-Inventor Charts the Digital Future: What a Wonderful Web it Could Be

It’s going to reach the same amount of people that the current mass media reach. But it has totally different properties than any of the previous mass media. The big impact that the Net’s going to have on culture in general is that it will allow it to become a lot more fragmented … I think that’s positive. It increases choice and diversity. It means that you can go find the stuff that you really think is interesting as opposed to the stuff that you’re forced to be spoon-fed because there’s nothing else out there.

The Whole World in Their Hands

Future network users will suffer from infoglut; the volume of resources available on the Internet will be completely overwhelming. There will be lots of gold, but more fool’s gold, tailings, and junk. If you search for evolution, you may get Darwin’s Origin of Species, fourth grade essays, creationist dogma, and erudite scientific papers. Mediocre and dreadful resources will be on the networks in far greater quantity than excellent ones, as always.

Flow of Information

The ethical, legal, and social implications of this technology are paralleled by those arising from discoveries in molecular biology. Some of these issues will probably be worked out in the marketplace, some in the courts. As in other domains, government monitoring and possibly more active involvement may become necessary. More important, the courts unquestionably will need guidance in issues that demand a high level of technological knowledge, but are not simply technological problems with technological fixes. And there will certainly be a need to increase public awareness of many complex issues.

Eisner On the Info Highway: Slow Down – Michael Eisner Speaks on the 500-Channel Television Proposal

In [one vision of the future,] viewers are blessed with the great gift of interactivity … They have become couch potatoes of the tenth power. Equipped with special glasses and a headset, people use their TV links to experience all sorts of events and sights and trips without ever stirring from their ergonomically designed lounge chairs. Virtual reality has now become primary reality … Cocooning becomes a form of self-burial and a relative to paranoia. [In another, television is] a “catalyst” for people to share common experiences … interactive television could not replace the “shared experience” of watching … the World Series … “Digitally compressed interactive high-definition television is not going to be the center of the universe. Why? Because there is no substitute for being out there, meeting, working, traveling, mingling and learning.”

The Dean of Disaster: Plane Crashes, Nuclear Reactor Accidents, Explosions at Chemical Plants – If Computers Were At Fault, Peter Neumann Knows All About It

If we were able to know in advance what the requirements were – and we really had them correct, and we were able to design something that was consistent with those requirements, and we had really gifted people who could implement the system in such a way that was consistent with its design, and we had gifted people who would operate the system, remembering what the original requirements were, so they wouldn’t compromise, and we had a user community that was fairly intelligent – then we might have a chance at having computer systems that we might be able to trust … There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong.

Bad Attitude: Business as Usual on the Infobahn

The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an “Athens without slaves” or a “Jeffersonian democracy” in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

Promising economies based on purely digital products will either be born in a state of paralysis, as appears to be the case with multimedia, or continue in a brave and willful refusal by their owners to play the ownership game at all … It may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems.