Digital Economy, Fall 2001: Thoughts for Prospective Seminar Students

For Prospective Seminarians

Some thoughts gleaned from this semester's study that might help you think about project ideas for the Seminar in Publications Design.

1. There's life in the new economy yet.

(a) Look for significant advances in information technologies: not just the Semantic Web but also wireless networks, smart houses and appliances, environmental and even neobiological computing.

(b) Consider alternative economic and business models, such as peer-to-peer distribution and Open Sourcing. This will take guts and brains, since you'll have to make the case that alternative models could work.

(c) The Internet is a medium, not a mall. People want to exchange ideas and sentiments more than they want to order products. Think about businesses that help people find their voice. For existing examples, look at Instant Messaging, Web logs, and multi-player game spaces.

2. It's the community, stupid.

Even if you're most interested in conventional, print publications, think beyond surface attractions to the group identity the publication represents. For on-line projects, think about schemes that enrich people's common experiences or bring them together. As Sean Carton points out, the best e-businesses use the Internet to create content that can't be accessed in any other way. Or as Greta Penninger says: "We're net people. We don't have roots, we have aerials."

3. Security and privacy: two sides of the 21st-century coin.

The events of this fall have made us all more wary and defensive. Security will probably be a major marketing theme for 2002. On the other side, people also want to be left alone, to have private space. Can this impulse be reconciled with the communitarian tendencies of the Net? Are there ways to bring people together without compromising their feeling of safety?

4. Safe bets in hard times: school and circuses.

As Ellen Shapiro noted in her lecture this fall, the go-go times are over and the immediate future looks a bit grim. People will certainly want to be entertained. They'll also want convenient, reasonably priced access to useful bodies of information in order to improve their competitive position in an ever-tightening labor market.