From Now On
The Educational Technology Journal
The Digital Revolution:
Why and Whither
For its December 2, 1996 issue, Forbes Magazine invited 52 unusual, boundary-breaking thinkers to consider and predict the digital future. This page is an index pointing students toward those essays as an example of the rich commentary now available on the Web.
It is suggested that teachers and students themselves might use this collection and its accompanying STUDY GUIDE as a model for future collections.
I see teachers developing such collections around various themes by "harvesting" the ZINES now available on the Web. I see students compiling personalized readings from the same sources along with e-mail subscriptions and customized news delivery via services such as PointCast..
We must teach our young people to cast their nets widely and skillfully so they may harvest wisdom (or what passes as understanding) from this vast new electronic ocean of information.
The List By Major Category . . .
The List By Author . . .
- Stephen Ambrose
When Was the Real Techno-Revolution?
"We live in an age in which rapid change is certain. We have lived in a century that has experienced more change than any other. Or so we believe."
- David Berlinski
The End of Materialist Science
"For the moment, we are all waiting for the gate of time to open. The great physical theories having acquired a marmoreal aspect, the heroic era of scientific exploration appears at an end."
- Tom Brokaw
Only Good If You Can Trust It
"When I began to get involved in broadcasting and journalism as a teenager, I lived in a world of AM-only radio."
- William F. Buckley Jr.
The Evolution of a True Believer
"When I was nineteen, I wanted to dance with my girl all night, but she stopped me, after a week's gluttony, and said she would have to go home to begin reading for her senior thesis. I grandly told her not to worry her pretty little head."
- Robert Conquest
Totalitarianism and Technology
"Nowadays, we seldom remember that the totalitarianism that emerged early this century was thought to embody, above all, modernity and technology."
- Stanley Crouch
Swingin' to the Digital Times
"Jazz was born in the streets around 1900, and technology was essential to its evolution."
- Esther Dyson
Put Friction Back in Cyberspace!
"Life has friction, texture, distance; those inconvenient physical conditions are a part of human life that we'll miss sorely as we move into the digital environment."
- Owen Edwards
Remembrance of Things Fast
"As she moved toward the end of a long life, my mother quietly embarked on a process of de-acquisition."
- Jeffrey Eisenach
Kakumei, Not Revolution, Is the Challenge
"The indestructible pillars of the industrial world, its ideas as well as its great institutions, have crumbled before the forces of the digital 'revolution.'"
- Federico Faggin
The Future of the Microprocessor
"Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1961, the number of transistors contained in a single chip has increased one millionfold."
- Bill Frezza
History's Greatest Brain Drain
"What kinds of societies would emerge if the fabric of civilization could only be woven from the voluntary exchange of value for value?"
- Francis Fukuyama
Trust Still Counts in a Virtual World
"This disembodied organization exists without institutions, without loyalties, without face-to-face interaction."
- Bill Gates
A View from Olympus
"More and more, information about goods and services, buyers and sellers, will migrate to the network. Once that happens, then the people who have been profiting as middlemen passing that information along--well, their world becomes very different."
- George Gilder
- Newt Gingrich
At the Cusp of the Evolutionary War
"You won't find out about the possibilities of cyberspace by hearing about it on network television."
- Al Goldstein
Cybersex Leaves Me Limp
"Somewhere in the wilds outside of Las Vegas, they areÊÊÊ laying plans for the world's first cyberbrothel."
- Andrew Grove
What Can Be Done, Will Be Done
"I have a rule, one that was honed by more than thirty years in high tech. It's simple. 'What can be done, will be done.' Like a natural force, technology is impossible to hold back. It finds its way no matter what obstacles people put in its place."
- Michael Hammer
Reversing the Industrial Revolution
"My advice to the somewhat overly enthusiastic technophiles peddling these visions is simple: Get a grip. Information technology will not be felt in direct and immediate ways."
- Mark Helprin
The Acceleration of Tranquility
"History is in motion, and those moving with it are so caught up that they cannot always see its broad outlines."
- Peter Huber
The End of Law, and the Beginning
"Legally speaking, broadcasts and VCRs are simple. It's the Web that's hard."
- Michael Jensen
Overcoming the Fear of Change
Ê"The technological and political changes buffeting the world are generating major industrial change paralleling that of the industrial revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
- Paul Johnson
To the Historian, Imagination Still Matters
"It is impossible to exaggerate the growing reliance on electronic storage systems for research historians."
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Can Giants Dance in Cyberspace?
"Instead of creating a new culture in tune with the expansive human possibilities of cyberspace, too many corporations are confined in 'bureauspace.'"
- Robert D. Kaplan
Technology as Magnifier of Good and Evil
"The record of history is clear: Though technological innovations have changed the way we live, they have not changed man's essential nature."
- John Keegan
Computers Can't Replace Judgment
"The mere multiplication of facts, however securely stored, however diversely categorized, does not assist but may actually detract from the ultimate effort a historian must make, which is to see the woods among the trees."
- Andy Kessler
Taking Stock and Making Cent
"Like those magnificent men in their flying machines, tech stocks go up, up, up, and they go down, down, down."
- Michael Kinsley
The Morality and Metaphysics of E-mail
"The way the new technology has affected my working life most directly has nothing to do with what I am producing."
- Richard Leakey
Computers Bring Old Bones to Life
"I confess to being one of the few people left in the world who is 'computer illiterate.'"
- Rush Limbaugh
The Thorniest Problems Are Never Technological
"I remember as a kid the predictions that by the 1980s we were all going to travel around in pneumatic tubes and eat our meals in pill form."
- Richard John Neuhaus
The Internet Produces a Global Village of Village Idiots
"I write this with a pen and legal pad at a vacation redoubt in the wilderness of Quebec, far from computers, the Internet, and e-mail urgencies."
- Patrick McGovern
Circling Back to the Small and Simple
"George Orwell got it backward. Digital technology is not imposing bureaucracy but restoring a bygone social order. Far from shackling individuals, computers are liberating us."
- Bill McKibben
Out There in the Middle of the Buzz
"Those billions of microprocessors that have spawned like springtime frogs in the last quarter century are constantly sending us information, data, and images."
- Roger McNamee
Your Road Map to Spectacular Returns
"Where product cycles are short and market leadership is often ephemeral, many of us choose to avoid the risk and invest elsewhere. Don't!"
- Michael Malone
The Frontier of the Heart
"Here at Downs Pharmacy, amidst the napkin dispennsers and catsup bottles, lies a tiny oasis, a respite from one of the greatest social transformations in human history."
- Thomas Moore
The Butterfly and the Web
"A digit, we might remember, is a finger, and a digital world is one where fingers are hard at work."
- Dennis Muren
Hasta la Vista, Humanoid
"For the first time in cinematic history, computer artists created amazing images, including a character that appeared just as photoreal and lifelike as the actors performing in the film."
- Ralph Nader
Digital Democracy in Action
"Information is the currency of democracy, and information age technologies can makeÊÊÊÊ information current, accurate, and inexpensive."
- Nicholas Negroponte
Been Digital--What's the Next Big Thing?
"Today paper is still a better display medium and, therefore, offers a better human interface than any computer. But that will change. We won't be the Atoms Family forever."
- Camille Paglia
The InternetÊ Sexual Personae
"A man came up to me and said, 'Do you know you're all over The Well?' 'What is The Well?' I asked."
- Tom Peters
The Search for Excellence Continues "In 1946 big companies were still managed by the seat of the pants. Bob McNamara changed all that."
- Virginia Postrel
No One Can Know Absolutely Everything
"It's a common story: the product that takes off in ways its inventor never predicted. The Xerox copy machine was famously more successful than anyone imagined it would be."
- Reynolds Price
Strengthened by a Pale Green Light
"By the time that tumor became life-threatening, my surgeon had mastered a brand-new tool of medical technology."
- Joe Queenan
How I Was Flamed by Serb Heat and Survived
Ê"Back in May, I spent three days writing an online novel for Mr. Showbiz, a service launched by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen."
- Jeremy Rifkin
A Radically Different World
"There has never been a neutral technology. All technologies are power."
- Paul Romer
In the Beginning Was the Transistor
"Every culture develops its own creation myth. The myth for Silicon Valley starts with the discovery of the transistor."
- Simon Schama
Hot-WiredÊ History...Unplugged
"Never confuse history with nostalgia. In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied toÊÊ understand its connections with the present."
- Rick Segal
Decade of the Customer
"Perhaps it's true that the World Wide Web will end not with a bang but a whimper."
- Frederick Turner
Virtual Reality Makes Everyone Principals
"This is the ultimate in virtual reality: A smell of dung and honeysuckle and mowing wafts up from the farm below, with the soft baaing of sheep."
- Steve Weinberg
At Last--What Sort of World Is This?
"We have not yet understood consciousness or intelligence, but there is no reason to suppose that these are anything but the workings of physics and chemistry within the brain. As far as we can tell, there is nothing in the fundamental laws of nature that will suggest any special role for intelligence in the plan of things."
- Rich Willis
New Math: One Plus One Equals Four
"In the information age, conventional mathematics is obsolete. Economics and accounting, which are based on an outdated version of mathematics, are likewise obsolete...in the information age, one plus one equals four."
- Ann Winblad
The Future of Software Is Now
" While the media hums with stories of the Internet, and how it's transforming the way we communicate, perhaps the missed story of our times is the revolution within the software industry."
- Tom Wolfe
Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died
"Something tells me that within ten years, by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American hospitals."
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