In the past, I’ve been called a lot of names, often including ‘overly conservative’. I was born in Illinois, but attended high school in Missouri – the show me state. This plus my engineering background led me to be concerned about the basics of any new technology espoused as the "best thing since sliced bread". Thus I’ve been personally very ambivalent about the wild phenomena called the Internet.

It’s really hard for most of us to separate the Fact from the Fantasy of the Internet. I don’t have the time or the inclination to dive in and spend a couple of hundred hours a month surfing the variously available content, and my few personal forays have meet with limited success. On the one hand, it took me much longer to find the home page for the DelMar racetrack to get opening times than it took my wife to get the information on the phone. On the other, I was easily able to find the jumper setting for a pair of ancient Conner disk drives at 11PM when I was desperate to get an old PC on the air. Like this summers movie "Phenomenon", I believe a basically good idea is getting both a lot more and a lot less attention than it deserves, especially until we understand its limitations and have worked around its problems.

I’m not very concerned about the rumors of eminent collapse of the Internet – although my personal experience is the net is so clogged at the moment that it is approaching a waste of my time. If there is real money to be made on the Net, those involved will find a way to pay for the infrastructure improvements needed. If not, the bandwidth problems will become self-limiting as users decide there are better ways to get information or spend their personal time.

Nor am I concerned about the Net as a mail or simple communications network. Within the specific limitations of the Net, these are obvious and ready uses of the technology. As a lower cost global point-to-point network, its economics win hands down and anyone not using or exploring using it must have money to burn. As a public medium, it currently seems the jury (the buying public) is still out on the use of the Net for more open and wide spread commercial uses.

I am concerned about several specific issues. First, is the type (and therefore the usefulness) of the content on the net. The Net is a wonderful and riotous free for all. As a medium of social expression, especially trans-national expression, it is a brand new way to interact with diverse people and see social problems. Whatever you think about the explicit pictures, the various chat groups, and the other personal presence’s on the Net, the broad exposure to the sub-cultures of the world, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ whatever that means to you, will undoubtedly over time change the face of our entire planet.

National boundaries are already much harder to maintain, especially in the technological and intellectual realms. This will create much hand wringing by the politicians of the world and probably some misguided local laws, but in the long run should help us understand our global neighbors and in the main, be a unifying experience for the world. Hopefully, this happens quickly enough to offset whatever political upheavals are in store as well.

A more interesting semi-commercial problem comes from the very openness of the Net. In order for it to be more than a social experience, users must have some justifiable or quantifiable faith in the information presented on the Net. If I want to research a computer problem, how do I vet the information? Anyone can hold themselves out as experts on any subject. The current web crawler type of indexes give us little insight to who is on the other end of the line - its a caveat emptor environment taken to the extreme.

Consider the issue in light of a medical question – you and I might go to the Net for background information, but would you make medical decisions based on information or opinion you received over the NET? Not on your life you wouldn’t, but perhaps not everyone is so cautious? Who is responsible in that case? The consumer, the network provider, or the information provider? What if the information provider is located in another country? These problems most likely can and will be worked out eventually, but until then be cautious, be very, very cautious in separating ‘Fact’ from ‘Fantasy’ and personal opinion on the Net.

Another problem has received at least a little ink here in the USA. It centers around the issues of access to the Net and the divisions it might create in the worlds peoples. We have here a medium that is potentially capable of measurably diminishing the world’s political conflicts but increasing its class conflicts. The new global struggle may not be with conflicts along national boundaries, but with ones along information boundaries.

As the Net superstructure and content continue to improve and businesses move more and more information and commercial offerings to this structure, what happens to those who can’t or won’t access it? Will we create a new class of informationally disadvantaged people? You may already consider me somewhat disadvantaged as I’m admitting I’m a late adopter.
What about the non-adopters? People who fear technology. Or can’t afford the technology. Or live in areas not wired for the technology? How do these people compete in an information driven market. Will the Internet become the world medium of American style equal opportunity for all, or will it encourage class based colonialism, the haves against the have nots? I believe this is a serious social and political issue we should consider and address as we continue to develop and move forward with our information super highways.