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What Art said about the internet remaining mostly in the hands of the Western middle-and-higher classes is something that's always at the back of my mind whenever I rave about how world changing the internet is for everyone.
I'm always thinking about what it would mean to take the internet to other parts of the world and for it to be used in a meaningful way.
For it to be used in the third world, there'd be a lot of infrastructure problems to overcome - access to power and telecommunications networks - but the beauty is the solution exists within the technology itself. Some technologies seem capable of providing a "roving infrastructure".
I kind of imagine an internet future that is not just wireless laptops in cool coffee shops or powerful suburban basement web servers, but also something like inexpensive wireless networks running off clockwork laptops in rural Mongolia.
That should be just as much part of the future as the persuit of raw speed and power, and it's why the text paradigm remains important.
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