The potential entails emphasis on personal connection. Not only must everyone have access to a broad range of tools and information, but they should take make something meaningful of the medium. Shallow, glossy, well-targeted salesmanship is a waste of technology.
When we are … connected through our computers, we can achieve collective creative heights. Computers have already changed the way we lead our lives. Doubtlessly they will continue to do so. What is up to us is utilizing the positive potential – figuring out how we’d like them to serve us, and demanding that of our technicians, as we make the Net in our own image.
Storytelling is cathartic in any medium. The Web offers widespread communication, community … Sharing stories online, we can pool experience and memory to ease our pain and expand our horizons.
[The Internet] needs to be subdivided into smaller neighborhoods. There should be high-class neighborhoods. There should be places that parents feel are safe for their kids.
One could imagine a very ascetic sort of life growing out of this, where the body is ignored.
[In the media’s future] Families will regroup around the evolving silicon hearths of a new cottage economy.
The most dangerous threat to the U.S. economy and society is the breakdown of our cultural institutions – in the family, religion, education, and the arts – that preserve and transmit civilization to new generations. If this social fabric continues to fray, we will lose not only our technological prowess and economic competitiveness but also the meaning of life itself. The chief economic challenge we now face is how to apply the new technologies in a way that preserves the values and disciplines that made them possible in the first place.
Public life will have disappeared because we did not see, in time to reverse the process, that our dazzling technologies were privatizing almost all social activities. It became first possible, then necessary, to vote at home, shop at home, listen to music at home, see movies at home. We replaced our libraries with interactive videotext, which even encouraged individuals to change the ending of stories if they didn’t like them, so that there no longer existed common literature. We replaced schools with home computers and television. We replaced meeting friends with the video telephone and electronic mail. We replaced visits to far away places with virtual reality. We became afraid of real people and eventually forgot how to behave in public places, which had become occupied almost entirely by criminals. The rest of us had no need to be with each other.
Many of the futurists who see a new day dawning are going to be disappointed by what they find at dawn’s early light. The notion that people who spend dozens of hours watching sitcoms every week and never read a newspaper will somehow be transformed into Renaissance men and women by the availability of new information services in the home seems overly hopeful, to say the least.
The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s. It’s going to have that power.