People are becoming addicted to all this stuff. It’s like television. Look at the education fall-off since television began. Why? Kids are vegging out. People are becoming isolated from the outside world, literally and figuratively. They’re dealing with pieces of equipment, rather than each other.
We’re moving at an exponential rate of change. This whole technological revolution is unsettling to a lot of us. These times are so uncertain for so many people, they’re looking to the past for some kind of anchor.
Channel-surfing will be an early casualty, as the first thing to disappear in a 500-channel world will be the channel selector along with the channels themselves. Viewers will welcome the menu-driven TV Guide simulacra that replace this click-and-surf world, but even these menu schemes will be merely transitional forms on the road to far more exotic context tools taking their inspiration from outside the TV universe.
[An] avalanche of content … will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools.
From Gutenberg to Sarnoff and on to today, developers have wondered how we would ever fill the pipe, yet content volumes have always outstripped channel capacity … The same will be true for digital networks. There will be no “dead air” on our new conduits. This doesn’t mean that content is king though, for if history is any guide, most of it will be fungible commodity properties such as game shows or old movies today, or utter trash … Now the “vast wasteland” … will be supplanted by a vaster wasteland brimming with utterly new forms of interactive cyberdreck.
There are no simple technological solutions to social problems. There’s plenty of distrust and animosity between people who communicate perfectly well. Access to a universe of information cannot solve our problems: We will forever struggle to understand one another.
The emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse, the forms of cultural activity, the enaction of power, and the experiences that give shape and texture to our daily routines.
Can the Internet culture survive? I don’t know. I do know that it has proved a remarkably hardy creature so far. I trust that with just a little bit of care and feeding it can carry on for a good while yet. If each Internet traveller who meets it on the road will do their bit to keep it going for a while longer we can perhaps enjoy its presence for a good while to come.
Neighborhood associations will probably flourish as people discover the ability to address common concerns like crime, public services, and property transactions (and gossip!). Ultimately, local governments may be the most impacted by an increase in grassroots associations. Finally, the most pressing task in promoting grassroots democracy is to diffuse Internet technology. The major barriers lie less in public policy or economics than in simply teaching people how to use the technology.
The theme of harnessing the physical infrastructure to improve the social infrastructure persists today. Community networks are a part of that thread. There have been some eloquent discussions recently about the issues associated with physical and virtual community. It is important to note that it is not an either/or choice. Virtual community can amplify the physical associations. On the common ground of the community network can be found, again, the sense of place that we all need.