What Your Children Are Doing
On the Information Highway
Outline
Jerry Stratton
- Can’t Get There From Here
- Information Backroads
- The information highway is still far from paved.
- The New Literacy
- In the 1700s, thousands of people learned to read
solely to get at Thomas Paine’s radical writing. What
does today’s Internet have in store for the mass of
people trying to get on-line just for the dirty
pictures?
- Internet World
- The May, 1994, San Francisco Internet World convention.
What does the Internet and the future look like to
convention-goers?
- The History of the Information Highway
- How did a bunch of swinging apes go from the trees to
the information highway?
- The History of the World Wide Web
- And why do politicians hate the web as much as slaveholders hated writing?
- Living in a World of Text
- Despite all the hype about full-motion video and sound,
the Internet remains a text-only communications medium,
lacking even italics and multiple typefaces. How do we
communicate in such an impoverished environment?
- Is There Anybody Out There?
- Some people on the net use it as one big party line,
ringing people at random at three in the morning.
- Go West, Young Men!
- Building an Internet business.
- A New Language
- How does the language of the net affect what gets done
on the net?
- Worms, Bugs, and Viruses: Lime Disease on the Information Sidewalk
- Look both ways before crossing this highway.
- Identity
- On the Internet, no one knows who you are except by
what you type. Some people even lie about their gender.
How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys when
you can’t see their hats?
- I Need Drugs!
- Searching for drugs on the infobahn.
- Rebel Without a Modem
- How does America’s love of rebels affect the
cyberspace cowboy?
- The Kinder Gap
- Boys in the Virtual Attic
- During Aerosmith’s World Tour of Cyberspace, I managed
one of the auditoriums. The auditorium fell to dust
twice during the event. It took me far less than three
days to rebuild it.
- English Addicts and Saudi Gamers
- The electronic frontier expands our circle of contacts
far beyond our physical world.
- The Joy of Publishing
- Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. A
computer is a press, and the Internet is a delivery
truck going straight to twenty million doors, and, in
the future, every door.
- Brave New Word
- It’s not print that’s dead. It’s printers.
- Exercising Control Through Anarchy
- There is no central control on the net. The only
control we have is that which we exercise ourselves.
- Natural Law
- Some truths really are self-evident, and one of those
is that people will talk when they want to talk. But
what happens when they say it in Texas, live in Canada,
and someone in Iran doesn’t like it?
- Culture Shock
- What effects can a global Internet have on an
individual’s sense of culture, and what can societies
do about it?
- Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
- Cryptography is the assault weapon of the Internet.
- Faceless On the Net
- They’re called ‘anonymous remailers’, and they allow
people to write letters and post articles without
revealing their identity. Or at least, that’s the idea.
The general consensus is that they aren’t very secure,
but they say a lot about the culture of the Highway.
- The Underground Highway
- The Internet is not the only international
decentralized computer network.
- Cerebus the Gopher
- Cerebus the Gopher is my personal Internet site,
dedicated to comic books, role-playing games, and
information about drug prohibition, as well as a bit of
information on gun control and other politics of
personal freedom.
- Usenet
- Usenet is the AM radio of the information highway. When
people talk about the discussion groups on the net,
they’re usually talking about Usenet.
- What About Alt.Sex?
- Happiness is a warm puppy.
- alt.fan.oj-simpson.die.die.die
- As uncontrolled as Usenet is, the ‘alt’ discussion
groups take anarchy to new heights--or lows.
- The City of God
- Will the infobahn bring people together in peace, or in
war? Will the global village be utopia, or Bosnia?
- Say You Want a Revolution?
- What is all this talk about revolution on the net?
- CyberCash
- There are those who claim that we are very close to
throwing out paper money entirely. How does electronic
cash fit into the information highway?
- You’re Paying For It, Sucker
- Just what does this lhighwayn metaphor mean, anyway?
- The Generation Gap
- As technological change speeds up, the generation gap
deepens into a full-blown cultural war.
- The Pinball Wizard
- Game companies have more money than researchers.
Children’s toys have always been on the cutting edge of
computers, and remain on the cutting edge of the
Internet.
- InfoShok
- Guerrilla Semiotics
- A well-educated electorate, being necessary for the
security of a free state, the right of the people to
keep and bear arguments, shall not be infringed.
- Information Media
- Can the traditional news services adapt to the
information age?
- The Internet Library Today
- The Internet is a library of information provided by
people with an ax to grind. But it’s only useful if you
know how to use it.
- Power
- Information has been called the third source of power,
after violence and money. In the information age, does
the power of the pen eclipse the power of sword and
diamond?
- The Internet Board of Control
- The Internet and the New World Order.
- The Library of the Future
- As near as I can tell, the “net of the future” is a
Santa Claus that’s supposed to give us whatever we want
whenever we want it. But can it really be that simple?
- The Information Promise
- What was it Peter Parker said? “With great power comes great responsibility.”
- I Sing the School Electric
- There is no institution more devoted to distributing
and creating information than compulsory and voluntary
schooling. What happens to our once proud schools if
the infobahn passes them by?
- Pushing the Envelope
- What can the infobahn of today give us now?
- Cyberpolitics
- Internetizens expect instant reactions. What kind of a
voting and polling system await us on the infobahn?
- The InfoPoor
- What happens to people who don’t have an address on the
information highway?
- MUSHing the Electronic Frontier
- What is the state of virtual reality on the text-based
net?
- Murder in Cyberspace
- In which Balder raises his staff; a Guest sleeps in Valhalla; Viking learns to spit;
IL stands for IsraeL; and a beginner is not a dunce.
- Do Not Bend, Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate
- Man serves computers as if they were gods, and defers
to their judgment in all things. But the more advanced
they get, the more mistakes they make.
- Alpha, Beta, Gamma
- When you buy software, and increasingly, even computers, you’re volunteering to help the software company fix any problems that occur while you’re using it. And problems are guaranteed to occur. It’s in your license.
- American Intifada
- Why does the Internet keep showing up in discussions of
revolution and counter-revolution?
- Another Lost Soul on the Information Highway
- Sex on the net. It’s all here in black and white. Well, text. Just like a newspaper.
- Junk Mail
- The Internet is a junk mailer’s wet dream. What’s going
to happen with junk mail when we get it delivered
straight to our computer?
- Addicted!
- It’s funny to say that television is addictive, but it
isn’t really a joke. The Internet is at least as
addictive as television.
- A Wake on the Internet
- The Internet is a world of communities as strong and as close as any community in the so-called “real” world.
- Good news: You don’t need to know this shit!
- You don’t need to know how to program computers in
order to use them. You shouldn’t need to know anything
more about computers than you know about your car.
- Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?
- Timed Obsolescence
- Everything that I tell you in this section will be out
of date by the time you read it.
- What You Need
- What do you need to have in order to drive onto the
infobahn?
- What you want.
- What are you going to want once you get to the
infobahn?
- Navigating the Net
- The Internet is a mess. There is no organization. How
do you find what you need?
- Serving Up
- What do you need to know if you want to publish
something on the Internet?
- Internet Death Imminent: Film At Eleven
- Federal Government: exit, stage left
- The privatization of the American net has now been
accomplished. The obituaries were premature.
- Pileups on the Infobahn
- What happens when you’re driving along the information
highway and the power goes out?
- Mimsy Were the Borogoves
- The theme for the 1995 World Conference on Computers in
Education was Liberating the Learner. But liberating
from what? From the people at the conference: from the
teacher, and from the school.
- Frontiers are for Children
- The infobahn is a completely new way of organizing our
world. Our friends and acquaintances do not have to be
the people who live near us. We find this an odd way of
life, but our children will not.
- Internet Farm
- Science promised man power. But, as so often happens
when people are seduced by promises of power, the price
exacted in advance and all along the path, and the
price actually paid, is servitude and impotence.--Joseph
Weizenbaum
- Signature
- The sole certainty is that tomorrow will surprise us
all.--Alvin Toffler
Jerry Stratton