Duin sees a blending of social and techinical areas of expertise in the future – merging studies of the technologies (interactive, multimedia and virtual reality) with the contexts of use (power, politics, relevance).
Trends shaping technical communicators’ skill sets … involve increasing human-computer interaction in the form of more online, multimedia and Internet activity, as well as more subject-specific and specialized sets of knowledge.
Computers were feared, would be the Big Brother’s tool, instruments of oppression, invaders of privacy, displacers of persons. All those dangers are still with us, and all those fears. The use of bar codes and scanners poses great challenges to a free society. But up until now, at least, computers have shown themselves to be capable of empowering people in ways we did not foresee 20 years ago.
The number of kids in cyberspace will continue to grow, and with it, the sort of often-juvenile, boundary-testing communications once limited to notes passed between students in class.
Today we have the Net, the last accidentally uncensored mass medium in existence. Is it a toy of the rich and the ivory tower, or is it potent? … Will we allow ourselves to be possessed by the vision of a Net whose purpose is to help create and support HEROES? Or will we dismiss it all with a keystroke and get back to the REAL FUN STUFF on alt.flame.Joe.schmuck.the.world’s.greatest.poophead?
Future research into the intellectual structure of computer work might help encourage these developments in a more conscious and systematic way, with the ultimate goal of formulating a democratic practice of technology – not just democratic practice of “choices” about technologies, but a democratic practice of the devices themselves and of the human activities in which they are embedded.
The Net itself does not dictate how it will be used. Such views are known as “technological determinism,” and they are tremendously common in discussions of the Net, which some people assume will bring a decentralized world of liberty and others assume will bring a centralized world of control. The answer is that neither outcome is necessary.
A large portion of [networked communications] prophecy relates to virtual reality (VR) technology, which promises all flavors of reality on demand. Some of it is associated with the combination of audio and video in the computer which is to lead us to the long-promised connection between the radio, television and computer. But increasingly there are fewer comments about the wonders of technology and more about the new forms of community brought about by CMC.
Once we can surmount time and space and “be” anywhere, we must choose a “where” at which to be, and the computer’s functionality lies in its power to make us organize our decisions about the places we visit and stay in.
People will become socially immature. Virtual realities do what people want them to do, and that’s not the way the real world works.