While most are not hostile to commercial use of the Internet per se, they have no intention of letting corporate America control its future. These facts have implications about the culture of the Net. It's not an unformed void waiting to be turned into a cyberspatial shopping mall by eager entrepreneurs. Business is finding that it has to adapt to their preferences and expectations, not the other way around. The Internet is the future of mass entertainment and news Of all the myths surrounding the Internet, this one is probably both the most amusing and the most thoroughly exploded.
Trouble is, nobody's buying.
And well they might be. If those people do the same job they've done in our public schools and inner-city neighborhoods, before long they'll destroy the network infrastructure and reduce the rest of us to a virtuous equality of paper cups and string. Historically, all of the media revolutions since the Industrial Revolution have supplemented older media rather than supplanting them. The telephone didn't kill off the Postal Service, and television failed to do in either radio or the movies. None of these media, despite predictions, have smothered the printed word.