Synchronous/Asynchronous

The tilt toward electronic asynchrony will have increasingly dramatic effects upon urban life and urban form … The distinction between live events and arbitrarily time-shifted replays becomes difficult or impossible to draw.

Spatial/Antispacial

The Net’s despatialization of interaction destroys the geocode’s key. There is no such thing as a better address, and you cannot attempt to define yourself by being seen in the right places in the right company.

Electronic Agoras

The Net … will play as crucial a role in 21st-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians on their Ionian rock.

The Last Link:Cybernauts in the Electronic Frontier: Pets on a Leash

Virtual communities offer the possibility that we can construct utopian collectivities – communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and skills. Indeed, the prospect of carving new, better virtual communities out of new territories taps into western mythologies of settling frontiers … What the hypemeisters don’t say or don’t realize is that this frontier metaphor deceives us. It conjures up Americana images of the individual lighting out for the territories, independent and hopeful, to make a life. But what is hidden by the metaphor is the cybernaut immersed in virtual worlds, neither self-reliant nor liberated, but utterly dependent for existence on technology created, provided, and sustained by others, living the isolated life of the placeless domesticate.

Strategic Assessment: The Internet

Individuals and organizations without Internet access increasingly risk being left out of important discussions and processes taking place via the Internet.

Challenges for a Webbed Society

If modern civilization obliterates safe public spaces for people to meet and freely interchange ideas, how will our society deal with such spaces formed only online? Will psychological dependence on networked communication create imbalances in offline relationships?

Challenges for a Webbed Society

As the Web alters communication and information patterns, the resulting change raises issues our society must face for individual, group, and societal responsibility. Moral and legal issues will arise in the areas of individual behavior, societal responsibility for issues of access and information literacy, and the new relationships, communication, and thought patterns the Web fosters.

Challenges for a Webbed Society

Humans often utilize technology in far too complex and quirky ways for neat predictions to come true. While not always far-reaching in their effects on society, however, technologies have gradually and subtly changed communication patterns, relationships and expectations.

Information Technology, Marketing Practice, and Consumer Privacy: Ethical Issues

Consumer concern about control over private information is growing, and marketers’ inaction and/or active resistance to change is increasing the friction over information ownership rights. In this situation, it is useful to ask what forces might lead to a change in marketer-originated consumer-privacy safeguards in the future … Change caused by a commitment to ethical behavior is likely to be less costly – or even more profitable – than change implemented to comply with new legislation.

Accountability and Computer Decision Systems

In the field of computer decision systems, norms are poorly articulated and only vaguely understood … We must turn our attention to identifying norms appropriate to environments in which computer decision systems are developed and used. These norms should be shaped to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of computer decision systems.