In text, where the impact of digital technology came first and most fully, desktop-publishing programs have generated tens of thousands of new publishing ventures such as special-interest magazines. These developments offer the merest glimpse of the possibilities of digital video. Released from the restrictions of mass media, American culture could attain new levels in both the visual arts and literature.
Revenues from telephones and televisions are currently at an all-time peak. But the industries organized around these two machines will not survive the century … As the telephone network becomes a computer network, it will have to change, root and branch. All the assumptions of telephony will have to give way to radically different assumptions. Telephony will die … TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance, they talk back and interact. People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse every year. Television is a tool of tyrants. Its overthrow will be a major force for freedom and individuality, culture and morality. That overthrow is at hand.
The Internet is going to become the medium for transmitting or providing information in almost every field you can think of, but you’ll still need a public entity that acts for the community in providing access. That’s the library.
In a couple of years everyone will be able to put their head on my body. They’ll be able to decide, “I choose to ask Ed Asner this question instead of the one Conan asked.” No one will ever see me doing my talk show. They’ll see themselves doing their own talk show. They’ll be able to choose Rob Lowe as a guest instead of Ed Asner. They’ll get a computer-generated Rob Lowe. I’ll become a guy who just installs modem jacks.
The future of cyberspace is not really about technology. Although it will obviously continue to develop, the essential technology is already here in one form or another. The thing we have to start recognizing is that cyberspace must be content-driven rather than technology-driven.
The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society … [There is a] rising hierarchy with data at the bottom, information in the middle, and knowledge at the top… [and] some would add intelligence or wisdom above that.
Some newspaper are looking at new business models. Extending the newspaper business to users of online services is a natural, if difficult, move … these systems may never be more than an electronic extension to the newspaper and want-ad services that account for so much of the revenue for publishing firms.
The gap between personal and mass media … is being filled by such technologies as community-produced cable television, electronically filtered news, computer discussion groups, and, I would argue, community networks.
Flat-panel screens bearing a multitude of images will be household regulars. They will range from tiny ones, costing perhaps $5 each and plastered everywhere, to wall-size ones for viewing video. The smaller ones, says Weiser, are “where you’ll plan your grocery list or do your homework. They’ll be the equivalent of Post-it notes on the refrigerator or the crumpled-up notepaper in your pocket.”
In a decade, every phone will have a screen on it.