Books such as Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, Cliff Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil, Danny Goodman's Living at Light Speed, and Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital range from prophecies of massive unemployment to utopian visions in which people will work, entertain, and communicate mostly through electronic intermediation. In the first half of 1995, I have counted over 50 nationally advertised meetings and symposia devoted to conjectures on the effects of the Internet. Newspapers and magazines now make the Internet headline news.
Bookstores find Internet volumes their fastest-moving technical books.
Adult education programs find that any course with the Internet in the title is a sure sellout, as a large contingent of information workers become apprehensive about their prospects for making a living off the information highway. According to Malone's vision, independent consultants would do all systems work. Work would be outsourced to computer services corporations that would specialize in contracting for the individual contributors. Using the movie industry as a model, systems projects would be put together the same way movies are produced-using temporary teams of directors, camera people, and actors working on a rented set. The atomized systems professionals would be connected by multimedia Internet workstations.