Why is it that drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?
If you don’t have an e-mail address, you’re in the Netherworld. If you don’t have your own World Wide Web page, you’re a nobody.
Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.
The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Here are my strong reservations about the wave of computer networks. They isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They undercut our schools and libraries.
Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you’re no longer hungry, but you haven’t been nourished.
When I’m online, I’m alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.
If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.
While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language.
As the networks evolve, so do my opinions toward them, and my divergent feelings bring out conflicting points of view. In advance, I apologize to those who expect a consistent position from me.
No computer network with pretty graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our society work.
It’s a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.
I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don’t deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.
The Internet has no such organization – files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.
Of course. NSA is rumored to tape record every transatlantic telephone conversation. Maybe they’d recorded this session.
Cliff, I’d like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can’t engage in domestic monitoring, even if we’re asked. That’s prison term stuff.
So what? Somebody’s always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions.” Martha.
Life was full: no hacker is worth missing a Dead concert for.
The hacker didn’t succeed through sophistication. Rather he poked at obvious places, trying to enter through unlock doors. Persistence, not wizardry, let him through.
As computers replace textbooks, students will become more computer literate and more book illiterate. They’ll be exploring virtual worlds, watching dancing triangles, downloading the latest web sites. But they won’t be reading books.