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What's Really Going On Here Is, This Is A Media Shift. It's Comparable To What Happened In The 1950s And The Birth Of Electronic Mass Media Back Then.this Is The Birth Of A New Kind Of Personal Media, Where, Instead Of We're All Watching One Program, We're All Watching Each Other. And The History Of Media Makes It Really Clear. Whenever We Have A Big Innovation, The First Wave Of Stuff We Do Is Pretty Crummy. The Printing Press Gave Us Pornography, Cheap Thrillers, And How-to Books. Television Gave Us Newt Minow's Vast Wasteland.

-Esther Dyson

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What's Really Going On

Esther Dyson

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What's Really Going On Here Is, This Is A Media Shift. It's Comparable To What Happened In The 1950s And The Birth Of Electronic Mass Media Back Then.this Is The Birth Of A New Kind Of Personal Media, Where, Instead Of We're All Watching One Program, We're All Watching Each Other. And The History Of Media Makes It Really Clear. Whenever We Have A Big Innovation, The First Wave Of Stuff We Do Is Pretty Crummy. The Printing Press Gave Us Pornography, Cheap Thrillers, And How-to Books. Television Gave Us Newt Minow's Vast Wasteland.

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What's Really Going On Here Is, This Is A Media Shift. It's Comparable To What Happened In The 1950s And The Birth Of Electronic Mass Media Back Then.this Is The Birth Of A New Kind Of Personal Media, Where, Instead Of We're All Watching One Program, We're All Watching Each Other. And The History Of Media Makes It Really Clear. Whenever We Have A Big Innovation, The First Wave Of Stuff We Do Is Pretty Crummy. The Printing Press Gave Us Pornography, Cheap Thrillers, And How-to Books. Television Gave Us Newt Minow's Vast Wasteland.

Few Influential People Involved With The Internet Claim That It Is A Good In And Of Itself. It Is A Powerful Tool For Solving Social Problems, Just As It Is A Tool For Making Money, Finding Lost Relatives, Receiving Medical Advice, Or, Come To That, Trading Instructions For Making Bombs.

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I Joined The Board Of The Santa Fe Institute.

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