This
document contains a list of trends I have identified based upon quotes
from managers, professionals, consultants, journalists, futurists, and
educators who study the ways we will live in the digital age. Click on a topic to jump to the corresponding section
of the document.
- "Life
in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson
would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty
and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community."
Source: John Naisbitt, Global Paradox, 1994.
-
"The
bioelectronic 'frontier' is an appropriate metaphor for what is
happening in cyberspace, calling to mind as it does the spirit of
invention and discovery that led ancient mariners to explore the
world, generations of pioneers to tame the American continent and,
more recently, to man's first exploration of outer space. ... Cyberspace
is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can be
a civilization's truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now
before us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his
or her own way."
Source: Ester Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and
Alvin Toffler, "
Cyberspace and the American Dream: A
Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,"
Progress
and Freedom Foundation, 1995.
-
"Today
we are at a turning point. We are leaving behind a world dominated
by easy, audiovisual, sensational, advertising-based media. We are
beginning a future in which the mass media's power will be diluted
by the low cost of distribution of many other points of view. Using
the Internet is still something like trying to learn from the pre-Gutenberg
libraries, in which manuscripts were chained to tables and there
were no standards for organization and structure. But like the mendicant
scholars of those days, today's "mendicant sysops," especially on
the Internet, are doing much of the work of organization in exchange
for free access to information."
Source: Nick Arnett, "
The Internet and the Anti-net"
- "The
Internet has transformed the physical citizens of a modern society
into the disembodied netizens of a postmodern cybercommunity, as
some hackers like to say. The jargon may be a bit extravagant, but
the changes are almost tangible. In the new electronic Agora of
the global village, publicity has assumed an international scale,
while privacy means electronic privacy in our e-mail conversations.
... Even the way we think may in the long run be affected, for relational
and associative reasoning is nowadays becoming as important as linear
and inferential analysis, while visual thinking is once again considered
to be at least as indispensable as symbolic processing. And as the
skill of remembering vast amounts of facts is gradually replaced
by the capacity for retrieving information and discerning logical
patterns in masses of data, the Renaissance conception of erudition
and mnemotechny is merging with the modern methods of information
management. In the electronic village implemented by the global
network, entire sectors of activities like communicating, writing,
publishing and editing, advertising, selling, shopping and banking,
or counseling, teaching and learning are all being deeply affected.
Such transformations are of the greatest importance, as they will
determine our lifestyle in the coming decades."
Source: Luciano Floridi, "The
Internet: Which Future for Organized Knowledge, Frankenstein or
Pygmalion? (Version 5.1), Spectrum: The WDVL Journal,
Volume II, Issue 1, 1996
-
"McCaw
has a grander vision than anyone else in telecommunications. ...
'Here's a poor village in Guatemala. They have solar-powered electricity;
they have television; they see our riches and they want them. But
they don't have communications, and they don't have the tools to
make money. Yet they have crops or they weave blankets, things that
could be quite valuable if there were not so many middlemen, if
they could essentially be a part of the world market.' If that becomes
possible, he argues, indigenous societies will be able to survive,
rather than disintegrate as young men and women leave to seek work
in the city. United Nations figures show the world's urban population
swelling by 168,000 every day, and with mass migration come scary
consequences. 'Whenever you add urban infrastructure, you ultimately
destroy everything that came before,' say McCaw. 'It's like dragging
the plague around behind you. The beauty of electronic technology,
unlike cars and freeways, is that we can resolve problems that are
completely intractable when you move people physically. Moving electrons
gives us flexibility.'
Source: Andrew Kupfer, "Craig McCaw Sess an Internet
in the Sky," Fortune, May 27, 1996, p. 70.
-
"Call
it the colonizing of cyberspace. Forget surfing: Today, people of
like minds and interests are establishing Internet communities faster
than any construction company in the brick-and-mortar world. According
to a new BUSINESS WEEK/Harris Poll, 57% of those hopping on to the
Net today go to the same sites repeatedly instead of wandering like
nomads from one to the next. And of the 89% of Netizens who use
E-mail, nearly one-third consider themselves part of an online community.
'We're at the beginning of an explosion,' says Andrew Busey, chairman
and chief technology officer of ichat Inc., an Internet startup
in Austin, Tex., that makes software for online chats. 'Community
and communications is the next big wave on the Internet..'
Source: Robert D. Hof, "
Internet Communities,"
Business Week, May 5, 1997
- "Before
the industrial revolution, the family was large, and life revolved
around the home. Home was where work took place, where the sick
were tended and where the children were educated. It was the center
of family entertainment. It was the place where the elderly were
cared for. In First Wave societies, the large, extended family was
the center of the social universe. The decline of the ... began
when the industrial revolution stripped most of these functions
out of the family. Work shifted to the factory or office. The sick
went off to hospitals, kids to schools, couples to movie theaters.
The elderly went into nursing homes. What remained when all these
tasks were exteriorized was the Ônuclear family.' ... The Third
Wave re-empowers the family and the home. It restores many of the
lost functions that once made the home so central to society. ...
the real change will come when computers-cum-television hit the
household and are incorporated into the educational process. As
to the sick? More and more medical functions, from pregnancy testing
to checking blood pressure -- tasks once done in hospitals or doctor's
offices -- are migrating back to the home."
Source: Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Creating A New Civilization,
Atlanta, Turner Publishing Inc., 1995, p. 86
-
"In
1980, in The Third Wave, we wrote about the electronic cottage.
Apart from encouraging smaller work units, apart from permitting
a decentralization and deurbanization of production, apart from
altering the actual character of work the new production system
is shifting literally millions of jobs out of factories and offices
into which the Second Wave swept them right back where they came
from originally - the home. This strange idea was ridiculed after
we wrote it by the establishment media like The New York Times and
The Economist. The New York Times ran a page one article dismissing
the whole notion as merely "visionary." Of course, The New York
Times today is filled with articles about people working at home.
It is not just work that is returning to the home. Health care is
as well. When our daughter needed intravenous antibiotics a couple
of years ago, she did not get them in the hospital. She got them
at home. Many processes that we once thought had to be done in the
doctor's office can now be done at home: electronic blood pressure
measurement, pregnancy testing, HIV testing, etc. We are now beginning
to see shopping at home and banking at home and building communities
from home. We are going to see (or hear) broadcasting from home;
we are going to be publishing from home; we are going to be organizing
political protests from home. In short, the home is becoming a more
important place -- or will become a more important place -- than
it has been for the last couple of hundred years. That last bastion
holding out against the Third Wave -- education -- will increasingly
reenter the home, at least partially, and despite the bitter resistance
of Second Wave educators who operate the compulsory cognitive labor
factories that we still call schools."
Source: Alvin Toffler, "
Future Shock in the Present
Tense," Aspen Summit '96, The Progress and Freedom Foundation,
August 1996
-
"The
Reintegration of Work and Life: I grew up in a society-rural Wyoming-where
we were spared the strange discontinuity between life and work that
has so shattered industrial existence. We worked outdoors in conditions
of beauty that others paid large money to experience. The hours
were long, but they were broadly punctuated with enforced opportunities
for peaceful contemplation. One waited for the cow to calve, or
the ditch to rise, or for the team of horses that pulled the feed
sled around to plod to the next haystack. We didn't think of ourselves
at being "at work" or "at play." We just lived. Among the horrors
I contemplated on leaving agriculture was the possibility that I
would have to enter into a condition where I ceased to be my own
exactly 8 hours a day and where time thus relinquished would be
my product, with diminished importance attached to what I actually
accomplished during these hours I rendered unto Caesar. Fortunately,
I was able to leap-frog from agriculture into information, where,
once again, I am always and never "on the job." I produce when I
feel productive, the means of my laptop being always at hand, and
hang out when I don't. My time is my own, to structure as I see
fit. ... And, just as I believe the paper-free office will eventually
become a reality, I look forward to the day when telepresence may
be enough like being there to render my travels unnecessary. Meanwhile,
I luxuriate in the enriched levels of experience these travels provide
me now. There is no good reason to structure information work as
though it were factory work. These offices, still run as though
they were assembly lines, will empty and the other folks who live
literally by their wits, as I do, will start leading lives of continuous
production and experience."
Source: John Perry Barlow, "
The Best of All Possible Worlds,"
Communications of the ACM, February 1997
-
"In
Mr. Pfeiffer's world -- much like that of George Jetson, the futuristic-Everyman
cartoon character -- the PC's will all be linked by a network that
controls thermostats and other household functions. Homeowners will
be able to call the system and tell it to preheat the spa, activate
the microwave oven to defrost dinner or record a favorite TV show.
The Internet will allow consumers to easily compare goods and prices
from different sources without ever visiting a mall."
Source: Eckhard Pfeiffer, CEO of Compaq Computer Corporation,
quoted in Scott McCartney, "Compaq's CEO Sees PCs Reshaping Our
World Into One Like George Jetson's", Wall Street Journal,
June 20, 1995, p. B5
-
"Once
upon a time in ancient Greece, people traveled from miles around
to an "agora" in the center of town to exchange goods and services.
Quaint, you say. Maybe, but we still shop pretty much the same way
today. We just call it going to the mall. Now, as the millennium
arrives, our centuries-old marketing paradigm is shifting gears.
The home - increasingly a place to work, learn and be entertained
- soon will be a center of commerce. Information technology is the
impetus. It promises to put consumers in control of what they see,
hear, interact with, and, therefore, buy. Sellers will have to be
more aware of their markets than ever before."
Source: JoAnn Stone, "
Buyers in the Driver's Seat,"
Perspective, Spring 1994
-
"In
a small room here at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Gary
Doolittle chats with a patient, checks her heart and lungs with
a stethoscope and then asks her to step behind a screen and disrobe.
A common exam, done in a most uncommon way: The patient is in Hays,
Kan., nearly 300 miles away. Dr. Doolittle can examine patients
across the state with gadgets like two-way television, electronic
stephoscopes and long-distance X-ray transmission. It is called
telemedicine, and to Dr. Doolittle, this is 'the perfect use of
the technology ... Patients get the same kind of care they'd get
if they were sitting next to me.' ... Telemedicine could eventually
bring back the old-fashioned house call, in a sense, says Ace Allen,
director of the University of Kansas Medical Center's Office of
Telemedicine Evaluation and Research. 'If you're really sick, you'll
go see a doctor,' he predicts. 'But if you just feel lousy -- the
reasons for about 90% of visits to the doctor's office -- you'll
call up and see the doctor on an interactive video system.'
Source: Bill Richards, "Doctors Can Diagnose Illnesses Long
Distance, To the Dismay of Some," Wall Street Journal,
January 17, p. A1
-
"As
the science of medicine evolves, technologies advance, and socioeconomic
changes occur, reshaping the current form of medical care becomes
increasingly important. In recent years, changing conditions have
emphasized the need for a shift from the current form of hospital-centered
health care to participatory patient-centered health care, where
medical information and training are brought to patients in the
home or in small communities, rather than bringing patients to the
hospital where they passively receive treatment."
Source: Michelle Y. Kim, "
A Multimedia
Information System for Home Health-Care Support,"
IEEE Multimedia,
Winter 1995
-
"As
we peer into the jaws of the millennium, technology is helping to
resculpt the bedrock of culture--the economy--moving us out of the
Industrial Age and into the Information Age. As we interact with
the world via our newly interactive TVs and computers--27 million
U.S. households have computers--another cultural phenomenon is unfolding:
the trend toward isolation. 'This brings more people back to their
home,' said Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute
in Rhinebeck, N.Y. 'A reverse process is taking place. The Industrial
Age took people away from homes to work locations. At the end of
the Industrial Age, people are moving away from a centralized location
to decentralized locations.' ... But some society watchers view
the trend toward an empowered home base equipped with modem as a
good thing. Celente calls it Techno Tribalism: 'People will be drawn
back to their communities, and they'll take more of an activist
role to see that their neighborhood develops in accord with their
belief systems.'
Source: Irene Lacher, "The Era of Fragments," Los
Angeles Times, January 2, 1994
-
"For
the first time ever in the history of mankind, the wilderness is
safer than 'civilization.' There are no crack vials in the wilderness,
no subway murders, no asbestos, no Scuds. Increasingly, we'll enrich
ourselves in the privacy of the fortress -- EveryHome in America.
The purpose of the fortress? Make us feel safe. Sophisticated distribution
systems will stock and supply the fortresses, the chore of shopping
as we know it will be over -- shopping has to become theater and
diversion. The fortress will be the center of production (bwe'll
work at home), the center of security (we'll make the fortresses
intruder-proof), and the center of consumption. Penetrating the
increasingly impenetrable fortress will be the primary challenge
for marketers and manufacturers in this decade."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report,
Harper Business, 1992, p. 4
- "Lone
Eagles are a special breed of knowledge workers. They live and work
away from the markets they serve. Some live in urban America. Many
move to small towns and to rural America. Most work at home. Lone
Eagles are the pioneers of the SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) movement,
trailblazers on the Electronic Frontier. We call these pioneering
knowledge workers Lone Eagles after the original Lone Eagle, Charles
A. Lindbergh, who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic
in May 1927. The fiercely independent Lindbergh was a versatile
man of many achievements. Today's Lone Eagles have many of Lindbergh's
qualities: audacity, versatility, dauntlessness, independence, courage,
inventiveness, determination, a quest for privacy and safety, a
desire to be their own bosses and an appreciation of natural and
cultural amenities. Many have been hit with a mid-life jolt: the
loss of a high-paying job in a large corporation, a mugging in a
big city, choking air pollution or a numbing experience with an
urban public school system. Lone Eagles are dedicated to the places
they choose to settle. They sink roots. They care about the community.
They are people who serve on town councils and school boards. Lone
Eagles bring revenues into the community, and they don't require
tax abatements or subsidies."
Source: Philip M. Burgess and Colleen Boggs Murphy, "Lone
Eagles," Center for the New
West
- "It's
likely that homes will come equipped with LANs that link most appliances
so power companies can adjust electrical peak demand and that enable
remote diagnostics to run on computer-controlled devices. Internet
services will be readily accessible and interworkable with video
services. Computer software will help set up teleconference calls
from home, support telecommuting -- which will be mandated in more
states where pollution from commuting has become a major problem
-- enabling multiparty games. ... Teachers and parents will be able
to confer by E-mail, and Johnny won't be able to claim that there
is no homework because you'll see see it on the Web pages for his
school and classes."
Source: Vinton Cerf, quoted in "The Internet: Where's It
All Going," Information Week, July 17, 1995, p. 31.
-
"Compaq
Computer's president and chief executive officer, Eckhard Pfeiffer,
opened this Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with the announcement
of the new peripherals and software, along with the company's strategy
to incorporate CEBus technology in the coming years. Called Consumer
Electronics Bus technology, CEBus is a computer technology which
will be the backbone of a networked home of computers which provide
information, communication, home automation, entertainment, and
security. Pfeiffer told a standing room-only crowd these changes
would be here by the year 2000."
Source: "CES - Consumer Demand Leads the Way," Newsbyte News
Network, January 9, 1996.
-
"With
cable modems you will come to demand wireless connectivity throughout
your home or small office, so that your teleputers can link to the
Net wherever they are without plugging them into a connector or
dialing up a connection."
Source: George Gilder, "Goliath at Bay," Forbes
ASAP, February 26, 1996, p. 114
-
"Operating
a wireless LAN in your home has a stunning effect, especially in
conjunction with a a thin, lightweight laptop ... The result is
a new kind of socialization. In the past, I would excuse myself
from the dinner table, watching TV on the couch, or lazing around
the house to go off and work at a keyboard. Being online meant not
being a part of the household. But no one complains when you
pick up a newspaper, magazine, or book while others are watching
TV. Right? Now, I can do the same with the Net and the Web and be
no more antisocial than if I were reading a magazine."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, "Wireless Revisited,"
Wired, August 1997, p. 166
- "The
home cacoon will be the site of the future shopping center. All
members of the family will be able to shop from lone location. Instead
of going to the store, the store will come to use, no matter how
unusual the product or how frequently needed. On our screens, we'll
be able to hear about the latest new products or styles, or order
up our old favorites."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report,
Harper Business, 1992, p. 164
- "The
means of distribution will be the next consumer-oriented revolution.
Direct shopping from the producer to you -- bypassing the retailer
altogether, no middlemen, no stops along the way. Home delivery
will become, not an extra service, but a way of life. One truck
delivering to a hundred customers will be a much more efficient
use of resources than a hundred customers driving to stores. There
will be holding tanks in your house for milk, soda, mineral water
(all refrigerated), and bins for laundry soap and dog kibble, for
example, all delivered like home heating oil."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report,
Harper Business, 1992, p. 165
- "The
second wave was the recent industrial revolution, which relied on
the availability of inexpensive energy. The consumer was separated
from the producer and the producer was in control The chief assets
were capital and labor. People consumed the products and services
that were produced by firms of ever-increasing size. They tended
to accept the notion that the producer was in some way Ôresponsible'
for meeting their needs. The electric utilities were responsible
for providing electricity and could make all the necessary decisions.
IBM was responsible for providing computers. The American Medical
Association was responsible for health care. The schools were responsible
for education. In the United States, the consumer's view of success
was obtained from other people and institutions, perhaps in part
from Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post. This era was
at its height during the Eisenhower years -- around 1955. In the
Third Wave, the consumer is in control. Information technology plays
the role that energy played during the industrial revolution. We
will see the demassification of production -- short-run, perhaps
even customized production -- based on computers and numerical control.
Certain mass-marketing concepts are being replaced by market segmentation,
direct marketing, specialty stores, and individual teleshopping
via home computers tied into electron sales networks. During the
second wave, national economies and markets replaced highly localized
communities. During the third wave, a reversal will occur. New technologies
are making it possible to produce goods and services localized for
regions smaller than a nation. As we move toward demassification
and the economy becomes differentiated, more information must be
exchanged and used to manage systems and processes. ... The consumer
are taking responsibility for his or her health care through nutrition
programs, exercise programs, and by taking the initiative in situations
such as getting a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. People
will no longer allow responsibility for their lives and well-being
to rest with other people or corporations."
Source: John M. McCann, The Marketing Workbench,
Dow Jones-Irwin, 1986, p. 225
-
"These
days, patients aren't shy about offering doctors their own second
opinions, and often they've done exhaustive homework. An array of
businesses like MedCetera have spring up to assist them in their
research, with reams - or megabytes - of arcane medical information.
... More fundamentally, the trend is an out-growth of rising patient
activism and consumerism, which have combined to knock doctors off
the pedestals they once occupied. ... Health Responsibility Systems,
Inc. Has logged more than a million consumer searches since October,
when it began offering a database of highly technical medical articles
through the America Online computer network.
Source: Laura Johannes, "Patients Delve into Databases
to Second-Guess Doctors," Wall Street Journal, February
21, 1996, p. B1
-
'Unlike
other World Wide Web sites dedicated to medicine and health, the
new HealthGate site is aimed at consumers as well as medical professionals
in terms of both content and search methods, maintained William
Reece, CEO of HealthGate Data Corp., at a meeting with Newsbytes
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a result, predicted the CEO, HealthGate
will help to meet the increasing need for patients to 'become active
participants in their own medical care,' through shared use of the
Web site by physicians and their patients. Patients need to become
more proactive due to the 'increasing complexity of the health care
industry,' according to Reece. Medical services are becoming consolidated,
and doctors are 'being forced to see more patients in less time.'
Source: Jacqueline Emigh, "HealthGate Web Site
For Doctors, Health Consumers," Newsbytes News Network article,
February 22, 1996
-
"A
real revolution in auto retailing is slowly starting to happen on-line,
and its changing everything about buying and selling cars. ... On-line
buyers are a savvy bunch and are privy to information never before
available to them. 'In a very short period of time, the last stupid
customer is going to walk through our dealership doors,' says Richard
W. Everett, director of strategic technologies for Chrysler's sales
and marketing operations."
Source: Rebecca Blumenstein, "Haggling in Cyberspace Transforms
Car Sales," Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1997, p. B1.
- "
Whether burdened by an overwhelming flurry of daily commitments
or stifled by a sense of social isolation (or, oddly, both); whether
mired for hours in a sense of life's pointlessness or beset for
days by unresolved anxiety; whether deprived by long workweeks from
quality time with offspring or drowning in quantity time with them--whatever
the source of stress, we at times get the feeling that modern life
isn't what we were designed for. And it isn't. The human mind--our
emotions, our wants, our needs--evolved in an environment lacking,
for example, cellular phones. And, for that matter, regular phones,
telegraphs and even hieroglyphs--and cars, railroads and chariots.
This much is fairly obvious and, indeed, is a theme going back at
least to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. But the analysis
rarely gets past the obvious; when it does, it sometimes veers toward
the dubious."
Source: Robert Wright, "The
Evolution of Despair," Time Magazine, April 28, 1996
- "Pop
culture is dead. At least pop culture as we had come to know and
love/hate it in the recent past, when it dressed, entertained and
molded America en masse. When culture popped in the 1960s, the entire
country would tune in to 'The Ed Sullivan Show' every Sunday night,
forging a vocabulary for the next day's national dialogue around
the water cooler. Three decades later, such solidarity is unthinkable
in the face of a 500-channel future. 'The most interesting part
of the story could be the disappearance of pop culture,' said New
York trend analyst Edith Weiner. 'It has to have a history communicated
through some generational mechanism. What we have now are flashes
coming and going everywhere. That is not culture. Those are fads.
. . . We have become a potpourri of cultures, and we have lost much
of what was our culture.' ... In trendspeak, this is the era of
fragmentation when it comes to pop culture--or pop cultures . Trend
watchers call this a nation of subcultures. With technology getting
higher and higher, commerce can cater to smaller and smaller audiences.
Fragmentation is linking arms with another late-20th-Century phenomenon--a
sharply stepped-up rate of change--to create an explosion of culture
pops. "
Source: Irene Lacher, "The Era of Fragments," Los
Angeles Times, January 2, 1994
-
"We
don't sit out on the front stoop any more. We don't watch the first
15 minutes of Carson before we hit the sack so we can laugh together
at work the next day. We don't all watch the Ed Sullivan show on
Sunday night. Our local newspaper is beleaguered by the pressures
of steadily decreasing readership, higher costs, and less advertising.
We don't even work in the office any more. Between telecommuting,
time on the road, and staying in hotels, the once-reliable office
routine is a vanishing reality for more and more Americans. Dozens
of other common experiences have disappeared from our lives, but
I'll focus on the changes driven by technology. The advent of 50
or more channels on cable has completely stratified our television
viewing experience. Our community is defined as never before by
our age and our interests, not by our physical location. The evening
newspaper is extinct, and the televised evening news may be on the
endangered list, supplanted by all-news channels. As people begin
to turn to the Internet for news or to future sophisticated hybrids
of television and the Internet, the advent of personal pages and
customized views makes any commonality of experience even less likely."
Source: Bill Machrone, "T
he End of Common Experience,"
PC Week, October 22, 1996, p. 85
- "The
future of personal computing is as a tool to connect what Watts
and I call Ôcommunities of strangers." these are people linked together
based on common ideas and values -- shared identify -- rather than
social proximity. This is an absolutely revolutionary change. By
using the computer to find people who share your views, you can
live in whatever kind of world you want. Reality is no longer a
defined constant. It is a choice. There are lots of kids today whose
best friends are people they've never met. they spend 20 hours a
week in chat rooms with other kids. Over time, as they share their
interests and lives, they develop a shared identity -- a real sense
of community that has nothing to do with where they live. It's a
difficult adjustment for parents. A father sits down with his kid
and says, ÔWho's our best friend?' And the kid says, ÔSabbit from
Bangladesh.' The father says, ÔBut what about Jake next door?' And
the kids says, "I don't have anything in common with him.' The father
is mystified: ÔHow can you have something in common with a kid in
Bangladesh and nothing in common with the kid next door?' But that's
exactly the point. Politically, the world is still organized around
geographic entities called countries. Socially, it's reorganizing
itself around shared collective interests -- communities of strangers
with their own language, rituals, heroes, icons."
Source: Jim Taylor, Vice President of Global Marketing at Gateway
2000 and author (with Watts Wacker) of The 500-Year Delta: What
Comes After What Comes Next, HarperBusiness, 1997, interviewed
by William C. Taylor, "What
Comes After Success," Fast Company, December-January,
1997, p. 84
- "The
virtual society is not only inevitable; it's real, it's here, it's
growing at a phenomenal rate, and it impacts virtually (no pun intended)
every facet of our lives. ... a culture once based exclusively on
physical contact is being transformed to one where goods and services
are accessible without face-to-face contact with other people. Technology
enables this transformation toward a virtual society which involves
change from the physically oriented structures of the 19th century
to the non-physical oriented communication structures (structures
without constraints of place and time) of the 21st century."
Source: Paul Gray and Magid Igbaria, "The Virtual
Society," OR/MS Today,
December 1996, p. 44.
- "America
is a consumer culture, and when we change what we buy -- and how
we buy it -- we'll change who we are."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report,
Harper Business, 1992, p. 4
- "Today
the majority of people around the world live in cities. ... Thirty
years from now, the big cities may be dying very fast. Downtown
office buildings have become dysfunctional. As information and ideas
have become mobile, the kind of work that doesn't require contact
with customers or contact with other professionals - in other words
75 percent of the work in any organization - doesn't have to be
done downtown. For 300-odd years we have had a continuing, occasionally
interrupted real estate boom. It was slowed down by depression,
but not stopped. That boom may be over for good."
Source: Peter Drucker, quoted in Kevin Keyy, "Wealth
Is Overrated," Wired, March 1998, p. 161