Neural networks are more flexible, adaptive, just like living systems, with the ability to evolve, to learn from making mistakes … We’re not going to take over the entire world in five years. Whenever you’re fighting uphill against an entrenched technology, you have to pick the right thing where you have a little bit of an edge.
Long-frustrated dreams of computer liberation – of a universal library, of instantaneous self-publishing, of electronic documents smart enough to answer a reader’s questions – are taking advantage of Mosaic to batter once more at the gates of popular consciousness. This time, it looks like they might break through.
The notion of media will be completely blended in one digital stream. Moving pictures and static pictures and text and audio – the mix of any of those will be commonplace. Imagine turning the pages of a magazine: every one of the images is a sound clip, and when you put your cursor over one of them, the audio comes. That’s absolutely going to be happening in 15 years. Full convergence of media and television and computers.
What is Mosaic? A navigator for interactive stuff on a network. The network happens to be called the Internet, but the physical network is slowly improving in bandwidth and someday it will be capable of carrying video. The slope of growth of the television industry is zero. It’s even negative. Television doesn’t change … People don’t have problems with interactivity on computers. More and more, computers are being built so you can see video on them.
Today, General Electric, General Motors, Colgate-Palmolive and PepsiCo are probably contemplating dull, wonky Prodigy chat zones and World Wide Web home pages where consumers can download product ingredients, annual reports, and bitmaps from ad campaigns. But advertising works by sneaking your commercial into a show your target market is watching … Online advertising needs a 21st-century Uncle Miltie who can captivate the wired masses with amusing shtick while shamelessly hyping the sponsor who paid for it all. Adam Curry, meet Jack Benny.
Mass marketers actually think they’re going to stuff the Internet full of all this wonderful content, which is supposed to represent the future of advertising, media, communications, and human interaction all rolled into one cute little branded icon … Online services aren’t about information, they’re about entertainment … Marketers should get back to their TV roots … The advertisers who will get rich by brilliantly exploiting online services won’t do it by feeding us specs, brochures, and blatantly bad propaganda, but by being sponsors. Let artists create content. Smart advertisers will make it big by sponsoring the digital equivalent of the “The Milton Berle Show” (aka “The Texaco Star Theater”).
As the fatter pipe or thicker connection that facilitates broadband interactivity is deployed everywhere in the U.S., it should be deployed in the classrooms as part of the first stage, not the last stage. For kids in the classrooms, the real connection to broadband interactive services is, I believe, going to be related to the greatest revolution in the history of education since the development of the printing press.
You have to be part of the communications network to participate fully in the economy … So you can make an economic argument … But also, I want you to participate in the communications system in the country for purely social reasons. I’d like you to be able to cast your vote in an informed way. I’d like you to be able to express your opinions, under the First Amendment, and to share in the development of community. Third, I have health and safety reasons for wanting you to participate in the communications system. I’d like you to be able to call for help. I’d like you to be able to get a diagnosis from an expert doctor in a remote location.
Electronic publishers will survive as providers of capacity for online service and as editorial quality-control filters, as in the print medium. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find people putting up servers for third-party information … Building free and compensated information services into the Internet is an important aspect of making the Internet an effective business and information tool.
Computers and the Internet may force artists out of the increasingly esoteric discourse of the art world. A broader audience may demand that they reintegrate their work with larger issues related to science, technology, and humanism … Computers may also force radical artists to return to a notion of craft. In the contemporary art world, painstaking studio process often seems to matter less than an up-to-the-minute ironic pose. Artists of the past had to grapple with techniques ranging from draftsmanship to fresco painting if they wanted to achieve greatness. Their creative inheritors may have to master digital tools if they hope to reach beyond the restrictive walls of galleries and museums.