The idea of information available at your fingertips and instant global communication is realizable. It will happen substantially over the next four or five years. As a result, we may end up suffering a little from information overload, or spend a little more time on the couch, but I see that as a symptom of our success.
I hope that we, as network citizens, take this opportunity to think through which purposes we would wish the dynamics of Net presence to have, and do what we can morally do to shape network culture so that Net presence becomes a force for community and solidarity, and not another generation of public-issues manipulation and star-making machinery.
The philosopher-kings-cum-cyberpunks who will interiorize the form of virtual space and create a new realm of writing are still a generation or two away.
It is unlikely that Michael Heim, David Bennahum, Don Langham or any member of the first generation of cybernauts will be able to accurately describe or assess the realm of the new technology; as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, we are blinded by our own cultural upbringing, and the realm of cyberspace is certainly one that cannot be inhabited for at least another full generation.
Networking technology and reduced computer costs will bring to minorities, poor people, and rural America information and opportunities that have previously been reserved for the elite, urban upper class.
The Internet has vast potential to expand the audience for works of the literary imagination; and not only to expand access but also opportunities for interactivity, and for building communities of creative minds that could not exist otherwise. It’s a lovely picture, one I’d like to believe in. But I know it is more likely that the Internet will become a vast cyberspace mall, every bit as commercialized as any other mass medium in a free-market society … It is … important that we do not surrender cyberspace and the new media to the purely market-driven forces of late-20th-century multinational capitalism. There are other values – values which cannot be measured in monetary units – that will survive only if we vigilantly carve out a space for them to breathe.
These academic renegades, like everyone else, will find their own refuge in private, moderated online services. Once they congregate on such systems, what’s to stop them from enacting new “acceptable use policies” banning all commercial uses? These people can recapture the Internet as they knew it in the past, a legendary place where commerciality and the rules of the outside world did not apply, and which no one in the outside world really cared about.
We should … see more public spaces reappearing within private service areas, such as community-based bulletin boards, in order to keep the noise down in public meetings and discussions. The public will be private in order to function at all. Act up in such a place and you’ll be tossed out on your virtual ear.
Many people just won’t involve themselves in the public Net at all. They will stay away from Usenet and stay away from new models of public discussions that will follow Usenet, such as large-scale public MUDs. They’ll sail through cyberspace in little capsules with hard encryption-generated shells, like they were driving through a dangerous neighborhood with the car windows rolled up.
Noise and the need to escape from the noise will drive development of the public Net. Forget infrastructure, forget superhighways, all that hack political vaporware. Feel the noise: buzzing static, fitful low rumbles, the clamor of excited mobs.