I have this hope that [the Internet] is going to revive the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Because suddenly people who used the phone only to communicate are writing out their thoughts and feelings.
The spread of home computers and their use as communication devices will almost certainly influence the viability of important institutions like the neigborhood, the local newspaper or the city schools. Not everyone will be a winner in this process; it’s a safe bet that the home computer will support some institutions while undercutting others.
[The Internet] makes it more efficient to be parochial, but at the same time it gets you to come across people and interests that you wouldn’t have simply by being in your small location with your previous identity. We’re seeing both things happening, and we don’t know which is going to be dominant.
Contrary to Gingrich and Gore, the Internet is not the promised land. Sure, our economic and social well-being would improve if some of our worst workers had better skills; but the skills they need most are basic literacy and good work habits. With those, computer competence will come if needed. The infatuation with computers as a cause or cure of social distress is misplaced. Mostly, computers mirror who we are: a people of vast vitality, great ingenuity and manifest imperfections.
Perhaps within a decade most Americans will have an e-mail address just as most now have phone numbers. The computer will become (as it is already becoming) a democratic appliance that will increasingly resemble the kitchen stove. Almost everyone has a stove. But some of us make hamburgers, and others make fettucini. Computers are the same; they reveal differences more than they create them.
As the Internet begins to attract more interest, more commercial participation, and more users, its culture will undoubtedly begin to change. The Internet tomorrow will probably be different from the Internet of today. To some, this is a good thing, and to others, this is a very negative evolution. Regardless of what the change means, the Internet will begin to change.
We need to go beyond literacy and computer literacy to “information literacy” … How can we take literacy to the next level so we can use it?
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
Mental entrapment without physical interaction undermines social relationships, and the disorder seems to be gender-specific. We’re fostering a wave of computer widows.
These new frontiers of the next millennium are the uncensored, distributed self, and cyberspace – the location of the virtual self/community – Electric Gaia.