It remains difficult to envision the future of traditional mass media on the Internet – who will be the audience, how will that audience access the information and entertainment services, and what profit might be made from the services?
If mass communication researchers continue to largely disregard the research potential of the Internet, their theories about communication will become less useful … The computer as a new communication technology opens a space for scholars to rethink assumptions and categories, and perhaps even to find new insights into traditional communication technologies.
In their favor, distance-learning technologies can conceivably bring all the data in the world to the student, a feat never before possible … But this is not enough. What about the analytical requirements? … What about discussion? What about writing exercises? What about being able to share the instructor’s expertise on an individual basis? These elements cannot be ignored … This type of problem might be overcome, but there still would remain lost the peculiar aesthetic of a classroom and the productive environment it fosters when the classmates are not two-dimensional.
CMC systems will eventually allow for multi-media and even virtual-reality message content.
[Networked hypertext] is indeed an exciting, provocative if frequently frustrating medium for the creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly as advertised, of transforming the very art of fiction, even if it now remains somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days, from the mainstream.
Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg’s movable type.
The novel … as we know it, has come to its end … True freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text … With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes … hypertext presents a radically divergent technology … Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners and co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.
Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.
Blending our actual telephones and televisions will surely require a lot more than FCC approval. The video side of the information superhighway is a one-way street and will remain so for a long time – even if interactive boxes do someday let us send a few bytes worth of nay votes up the line toward Geraldo.
There is a tendency to anthropomorphize a single agent on whose intelligence the users of the program will come to depend. It is this superagent that is often analogized to a butler or personal assistant.