Let me take you on a vicarious journey into CyberSpace. I’m looking for information on the economic impact of the global information age on business and society.
I’ll be using the new Mosaic 2.0.0b2 web browser on its first real test since a smooth installation yesterday. I’ll begin with the Starting Points menu instead of my Business or Society menu items to see which sources have been added or updated.
My favorite starting point is http://www.einet.net/galaxy.html. This site is what I refer to as a top-level directory server. The webmasters at this site have organized information by topics such as Arts and Entertainment, Business and Commerce, Government, Law, etc.
Since economics is the highest level of abstraction, or generality, I’ll start with the Social Sciences topic which has Economics as a sub-heading link. Clicking on this link causes a web page to be delivered whose top-level headings concern economics, with links to other economic information sources.
Under Documents there’s the fiscal ‘95 US Government budget. Under Collections there’s the Economic Bulletin Board, gopher://una. hh.lib.umich.edu:70/11/ebb, The Economist, gopher://gopher.enews. com/11/magazines/alphabetic/all/economist, the Post Keynesian Thought Archive, gopher:// csf.colorado.edu:70/11/econ, and over a dozen more.
The Directories heading contains links to the membership directory of the American Economics Association, Bureau of Labor Statistics, FDIC, SBA, and economics collections at a few dozen universities.
I didn’t see anything that directly addressed what I’m looking for though, so I’ll click on the back button and reload the EINet home page. In re-thinking my search objectives, it seems Reference and Interdisciplinary Information may be a better place to start, with its Internet and Networking subheading.
Linking to this page lists enough documents and sources to keep me busy for days. The urge to go off on a sidetrail is strong, but first I’ll grab a copy of Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond, by the Nrenaissance Committee, ftp://ftp.nas.edu/pub/reports/realizing_the_information_future/ascii.
Next stop is Other Network Research Sites, http://netlab.itd. nrl.navy.mil:80/onr.html, which is the Naval Research Lab’s hypertext page of links to other research sites. Following a few of the links shows that the majority of them concern network design and protocol research. Not what I’m looking for now, but I’ll come back to this page for other current projects. It gets added to my Network menu item. Jumping back to the Internet and Networking page, another of the links that looks interesting is the Europe and the Global Information Society - Bangemann Report, http://www.earn.net:80/EC/bangemann.html.
This report turns out to be a real jewel. Between this one and the Nrenaisance report, I’ll have quite a bit of the information I was looking for. I’ll also probably go to one of the first sites I found, where the electronic version of The Economist was housed, to see which articles there will be usefull.
By the way, the new version of Mosaic performed as advertised. This one will replace Netscape as my browser of choice for now.
Now, however, a technology is available that allows you to regain some of that privacy, and protect other parts. I’m talking about key encryption techniques.
There should be an acceptance, and even an encouragement, by business and government for people to use secure encryption techniques. The more comfortable people can become with technology, the more they see technology as a tool that helps them, and not harms them, the more who will use technology productively.
This country, and all others, needs to keep its populace up to date and comfortable with technology in order to stay competitive, growing, and healthy in the rapidly evolving information age. There is a need for a sizable portion of the population to be techno-literate. By helping to make computers allies, these goals can be more easily achieved.
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Questions or comments about these Web pages? Send e-mail to
dave@reststop.net