Cityspace, Cyberspace and the Spatiology of Information

There may well be hundreds of cyberspace domains someday, with unique cultures and purposes, like countries.

I Am Not My Habits: On Our Guard Against Targeted Advertising

Identified by and targeted for our product consumption, we will find ourselves receiving more personalized mail from products than from people. They will know us, and they will manipulate us. We will end up hating the Internet, and ourselves.

Legally Online: Noise and the Public Net

Web servers may add features to support online communities in the future and come to be a valuable part of online community. At that point they will no longer be Web servers as we know them today, but a kind of bulletin board software system.

Cityspace, Cyberspace and The Spatiology of Information

What might we say … of a time when super-fast computers, singly and together, generate and sustain totally absorbing visual worlds, populated and teeming with avatars and scoundrels and gigantic, dizzying databases tilting like drunken electric pyramids…when, in the silicon banks of machines whirring in stuffy rooms there breathe whole alternative cities, the sites of a delirious new urbanism entire?

Cyberspace 2020: The Future of Cyberspace Will Rely Not on Our Ability to Police it, but on What We Collectively Build There

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.

Beyond E-mail and Databases

Electronic communities will revolutionize “how people interact with information.” … The communities will create a new way for scientists to record and share information and insights … This linkage ability, Schatz predicts, will turn computer networks into something much more than the high-powered library and communications systems they are today.

The Parent Trap

The really serious problems are not about computers. They are about resistance to revising concepts of childhood (including modes of parenting and schooling) shaped in a bygone epoch.

The Ghost in the Modem: For Architects of the Info-Highway, Some Lessons From the Concrete Interstate

To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services … We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives? … [We should include] lay people in technology decision-making.

Cybersobriety

Electronic media decompose holistic experience into analytically distinct sensory dimensions and then transmit the latter. At the receiving end, people can resynthesize the resulting parts into a coherent experience, but the new whole is invariably different and, in some fundamental sense, less than the original.

Just Child’s Play

Unlike the craze for baggy jeans and Pogs, this isn’t just some passing fad. Market researchers predict the number of kids online could triple by the end of 1998. So when the big bills come – and they will – parents will have only themselves to blame for bringing computers and online services home with them.