(3089/898) Net returns

1679) The popular prediction that electronic communication would create a global village has been shown to be wrong. What is being created is less like a village than an entity that reproduces the worst aspects of urban life: the ability to retreat into small communities of the like-minded, where we are safe not only from unnecessary interactions with those whose ideas and attitudes are not like our own, but also from having to relate our interests and results to other communities.

Vartan Gregorian
"A Place Elsewhere: Reading in the Age of the Computer"
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1/1996)
quoted by James Fallows in
"Caught in the Web" in
New York Review of Books (2/15/1996)
[review of The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]

1680) Clearly computers will have large cultural effects, as will any shift in technology. Yet having myself worked with and written about computers for nearly twenty years, I can't believe that their most important or their worst effects will be on contemporary culture. Most of what computers make possible is an extension of previous habits and functions. People once wrote letters; now they send e-mail. It is different but it's also the same. I would be surprised if computers change the tone of life more radically than the telephone did. Their cultural impact probably won't be as great, and cannot be as bad, as that of TV.

The most worrisome cultural implication of the new developments may be the one least discussed in print so far: the sudden concentration of the number of "content providers," as NBC allies itself with Microsoft, CNN is absorbed by Time, Disney buys ABC, and the once-diverse universe of publishers, software companies, and entertainment studios reduces itself to a handful of giant combines. But this trend toward concentration is not caused by computers - which are, indeed, often described as the main instrument for a decentralized, nonhierarchical communications system.

James Fallows
"Caught in the Web" in
New York Review of Books (2/15/1996)
[review of The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]

1681) Numerous writers have worried about the tendency of electronic exchanges to fly off into vituperation, or to be dominated by political extremists, most of them (as it happens) from the right wing.

James Fallows
"Caught in the Web" in
New York Review of Books (2/15/1996)
[review of The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson]