4 forces that will shape the internet

摘要

Sure, the Net's supposed to melt hierarchies, leap borders, and make information and communication free. It won't do all that. But in the next five years, reality will be more interesting than the dream. One of the virtues of a virtual place is that it can be whatever you want it to be. For much of its history, that was the charm of the Internet—a cross between a swimming hole and a cosmological worm hole, a secret place where nerds, geeks, and others in the know could gather, and then, collapsing time and distance, travel anywhere in the world, often to the electronic inner sanctums of institutions that would have turned them away if they had shown up in person and knocked on the door.