Michael, i guess people don't realize how important it is that we post here:
Internet holds key to world peace
By Suzanne Perry
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Tired of all the hype about the Internet?
Well, think again -- one respected Internet guru says it will bring
world peace.
Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Media Laboratory, told an information technology
conference in Brussels Tuesday that the potential of the global
computer network had actually been vastly underrated.
"I have never seen people miss the scale of what's going on as badly
as they are doing it now," he said, predicting that the Net would do no
less than bring world peace by breaking down national borders.
Twenty years from now, he said, children who are used to finding out
about other countries through the click of a mouse "are not going to
know what nationalism is."
Negroponte faulted European countries outside of Scandinavia,
including France and Germany, for not climbing on the Internet
bandwagon, saying they were on par with the Third World.
"It's almost as if somebody took a big, thick, black magic marker and
drew a line separating Scandinavia from the rest of Europe," he told
the conference, sponsored by the European Commission.
He specifically criticized German phone giant Deutsche Telekom for
raising local phone rates and thus deterring children from tapping into
the Internet.
"Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean
air," he said.
Negroponte said the U.S. Administration was among those who had
underestimated the Internet's impact, citing its prediction that
electronic commerce would be worth $300 billion by the year 2001.
The figure will actually hit $1 trillion by 2000, fueled by the one billion
people who will be using the Internet by then, half of them in
developing countries, he said.
Negroponte, author of the book "Being Digital," said forecasters were
understating the Internet's potential because they were not taking full
account of children's growing "digital literacy."
In the United States, he said, 85 percent of all teenagers have access
to a personal computer at home and virtually every 14-year-old is
"digitally literate."
"One of the reasons people underestimate the consequences is they
forget how quickly children grow up," he said. |
