Regulating Cyberspace

[The Internet is] “colliding with America – it’s ignoring an enormous legal, cultural, and political culture.” Working with that culture, he suggested, “will be a lot harder than anything they’ve done before.”

Regulating the Internet

The Internet will evolve the way we make it evolve. It’s the first time the use of technology depends on how we want it. In this age, we’re dissatisfied with large institutional efforts, so this means bringing it closer to people, making it more responsive to individual citizens.

Regulating the Internet

By 2000 there will be 300 million users online.

Cyberspace 2020

Cyberspace is defined and delineated first and foremost by its content. And its future depends not on our ability to police it, but rather upon what we collectively build there that is of real public assistance and social value.

Cyberspace 2020

Will the development of cyberspace precipitate a migration away from the crime-ridden big cities back to rural living, a trend which would greatly affect state and local planning? This is possible if people are able to send their children off each morning to a virtual school or university and then report to work in a virtual office where they interface with co-workers hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, then drop into a virtual shopping mall at lunchtime to handle their more elaborate shopping needs, get together with friends after work at a virtual cafe, and then download the news, book, television program or film of their choice to pass the evening hours.

Bring Back the Urban Visionaries: Why Have the Best Technology Brains Stopped Trying to Solve Urban Problems?

No cyber-fair could possibly compete with or be remembered alongside a real one. The greatness of the great world’s fairs was inseparable from their greatness as places where you saw daring architecture, heard music and fountains and the snap of flags, smelled the hot dogs, and above all joined the crowd. The actual crowd.

Bring Back the Urban Visionaries: Why Have the Best Technology Brains Stopped Trying to Solve Urban Problems?

We ought to get over our dazzlement with modern technology and address technologists differently. Fecund telecosms are all well and good, we ought to tell them, but while you’re up would you mind arranging for the trains to run on time? … Modern technology does not doom the city, because it does not change human nature.

Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts

Computers and community networks will change the way we do business, govern, and relate to one another. I support the idea that the computer systems we design are meant to facilitate and enhance the business or social relations we have with other people, not to supplant them.

Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts

The origins of the data highway metaphor are not the speeches of Vice President Al Gore. It was used as early as 1971 when Ralph Smith, writing in The Nation, also coined the term “The Wired Nation” … His vision convinced people at the FCC to lower the regulatory barriers to the development of cable … Many communications companies … are adding value by adding intelligence to the network. Groups such as librarians and educators feel that the intelligence should be in the form of the users, moderators and other intermediaries who will populate the networks, alongside the software agents slowly emerging from labs and companies. These developments and the spread of the national infrastructure will heavily influence the choices cities and regions have as they establish community networks.

Building the Information Marketplace

Philosophically, the NII should be viewed as a new means of controlling our personal locality – choosing our working associates, vendors, entertainers, and perhaps even friends, without being limited to those that happen to be physically near. With the importance of physical proximity diminished, every person on the national information infrastructure could assemble his or her own electronic neighborhood.