It's becoming almost standard in reports on new technology to find a quote from someone at Forrester Research Inc., a rapidly growing firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That someone, more often than not, is Mary Modahl, Forrester's group director, author of The Forrester Report on People and Technology and a woman whose views on new media are highly sought on Wall Street.
When I met Modahl, Forrester was about to expand once again. There was determined activity everywhere but nearly no unoccupied space. When we did settle down in a momentarily empty office, Modahl's conversational style regarding the future of the Internet turned out to be quirky, high-speed and data rich.
wired: Will the Internet collapse under the weight of its own success?
modahl: So far as Wall Street goes, you're going to see a certain sobriety take over, an end to what has been called "momentum investing". But will the Internet be brought down under its own weight? Not at all. The move to commercialisation means there's a very significant build-out of the Internet by companies who want to offer a service. That will result in a considerably more reliable network.
What's the most the Web can turn out to be? What's the point of fizzle?
Right now it's like a neutron bomb went off on the Web. All the buildings are there, but you don't have a sense of people the way you do in online services where there's an aliveness, a sense of others. The way-out vision for the Web is that when you go to a site, there will be people. You sense them, they sense you. It's a social experience, like walking into a store. Right now, it's like looking at signs and billboards.
It could be like AOL's instant-message features, it could be avatars, it could be 3D, 2D, or even print, but when you get to a Web site, you want to know who's there. You want to be able to meet your friends.
You wrote that Web commerce today amounts to "a dozen pizzas, two or three flower bouquets a week and a dozen subscriptions," but by the year 2000, there will be US$7 billion in sales. How do you get from two pizzas to $7 billion?
Pizza prices soar! No, the thing to keep in perspective is that $7 billion is diddly when we're talking retail sales. Retail sales in the US are more like $5 trillion. Catalogue sales are $53 billion.
You're going to see travel purchases increase. You're going to see a lot more software and hardware sold online. We're also optimistic about grocery-shopping services like Peapod. Grocery bills typically range from $100 to $200 a week. Less than 20% of the online population will do their shopping online, but those who do will spend a lot, from airline tickets to groceries.
Will advertising play a major role on the Net?
Advertisers are willing to spend on the medium. There will be 33 million people in the US on the Internet by the year 2000, and some projections are much higher. This is an upper-income demographic, more educated than average, more likely to have children. It's the demographic that consumer-goods companies want most to talk to.
How they do that needs to be examined. New models need to be explored. And that's where content smashes together with advertising. In the early days of television, there was a corporate-sponsored game show. On the Web, we may see the Doritos content site.
If the Net gets better for business, will that come at the expense of personal expression?
The possibility of the Internet supporting a new art form is huge. I don't think the presence of business will interfere with that any more than the presence of Citicorp prevents New York's East Village from existing.
Will dumb, Internet-only terminals replace PCs?
I think it's a dumb idea. Just producing a $500 computer that does anything useful has proven to be extremely difficult. And videogame-machine producers will tell you that even at $300 you enter a pricing abyss, where consumers don't want to buy.
Will expanding bandwidth make real-time phone service commercially viable over the Internet?
No. Real-time voice is a hobby, like ham radio, not a permanent application. As a packet-switching network, the Internet just isn't matched to voice streams that need continuous connection to run well. Anyway, the phone system works - why fix it?
When you write that "vices such as pornography, gambling and money laundering" flourish on the Internet, does that mean you are calling for censorship?
I don't think government censorship can succeed. They can pass laws, but enforcement will be very difficult. I think you will begin to see the equivalent of red-light districts, centres of the Internet understood to be pornographic, so that people can stay away or lock their children out if they want to. Search tools and indexing can provide a clear delineation between red-light and green-light sites, so you can stick to your side of the street.
Should government subsidise telecommunications as a way to boost the economy?
It's very important for government to look at the Internet as a national strategic asset with about a $100-billion impact on the economy. But in the United States, subsidy is unnecessary. The competitive activity in the industry is very high; the pressure on prices to come down is very strong. The scope of participation - new entrants as well as established players - is such that subsidy is not necessary here, though it may be in other countries.
Speaking of other countries, why is there less furore about connectivity in Europe, less concern about getting wired?
There is not a love affair with technology the way there is in the US. We're kind of like the Borg - the bizarre people on Star Trek who are half machine, half human. We are the Borg of the world community.
Harvey Blume (joel@ai.mit.edu) is a critic and co-author of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo.