Chapter 10

Where is all this taking us?

Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the Information Highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today.

Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1995

It's a sign of how right Bill Gates was back in 1995 when he wrote of the unpredictable future of the Internet that even the language he used then now seems so out of date. No-one today talks of the ‘information highway’, and the special ‘Internet culture’ of 1995 has been supplanted by something new, in which selling has a powerful role, big businesses figure large alongside small organizations, and which caters for new mass audiences. But if we stick to Mr Gates’ wagon train analogy, the Internet wagon ...

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