Digital Life CyberTrends
Professor John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Additions to this document since November 6, 1997 are preceded with the 
icon.
This document contains a list of trends I have identified based upon quotes from managers, professionals, consultants, journalists, futurists, and educators who study the ways we will live in the digital age. Click on a topic to jump to the corresponding section of the document.
- "Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community."
Source: John Naisbitt, Global Paradox, 1994.
- "The bioelectronic 'frontier' is an appropriate metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace, calling to mind as it does the spirit of invention and discovery that led ancient mariners to explore the world, generations of pioneers to tame the American continent and, more recently, to man's first exploration of outer space. ... Cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can be a civilization's truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now before us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his or her own way."
Source: Ester Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age," Progress and Freedom Foundation, 1995.
- "Today we are at a turning point. We are leaving behind a world dominated by easy, audiovisual, sensational, advertising-based media. We are beginning a future in which the mass media's power will be diluted by the low cost of distribution of many other points of view. Using the Internet is still something like trying to learn from the pre-Gutenberg libraries, in which manuscripts were chained to tables and there were no standards for organization and structure. But like the mendicant scholars of those days, today's "mendicant sysops," especially on the Internet, are doing much of the work of organization in exchange for free access to information."
Source: Nick Arnett, "The Internet and the Anti-net"
- “The Internet has transformed the physical citizens of a modern society into the disembodied netizens of a postmodern cybercommunity, as some hackers like to say. The jargon may be a bit extravagant, but the changes are almost tangible. In the new electronic Agora of the global village, publicity has assumed an international scale, while privacy means electronic privacy in our e-mail conversations. ... Even the way we think may in the long run be affected, for relational and associative reasoning is nowadays becoming as important as linear and inferential analysis, while visual thinking is once again considered to be at least as indispensable as symbolic processing. And as the skill of remembering vast amounts of facts is gradually replaced by the capacity for retrieving information and discerning logical patterns in masses of data, the Renaissance conception of erudition and mnemotechny is merging with the modern methods of information management. In the electronic village implemented by the global network, entire sectors of activities like communicating, writing, publishing and editing, advertising, selling, shopping and banking, or counseling, teaching and learning are all being deeply affected. Such transformations are of the greatest importance, as they will determine our lifestyle in the coming decades.”
Source: Luciano Floridi, “The Internet: Which Future for Organized Knowledge, Frankenstein or Pygmalion? (Version 5.1), Spectrum: The WDVL Journal, Volume II, Issue 1, 1996
- "McCaw has a grander vision than anyone else in telecommunications. ... 'Here's a poor village in Guatemala. They have solar-powered electricity; they have television; they see our riches and they want them. But they don't have communications, and they don't have the tools to make money. Yet they have crops or they weave blankets, things that could be quite valuable if there were not so many middlemen, if they could essentially be a part of the world market.' If that becomes possible, he argues, indigenous societies will be able to survive, rather than disintegrate as young men and women leave to seek work in the city. United Nations figures show the world's urban population swelling by 168,000 every day, and with mass migration come scary consequences. 'Whenever you add urban infrastructure, you ultimately destroy everything that came before,' say McCaw. 'It's like dragging the plague around behind you. The beauty of electronic technology, unlike cars and freeways, is that we can resolve problems that are completely intractable when you move people physically. Moving electrons gives us flexibility.'"
Source: Andrew Kupfer, "Craig McCaw Sess an Internet in the Sky," Fortune, May 27, 1996, p. 70.
- "Call it the colonizing of cyberspace. Forget
surfing: Today, people of like minds and interests are establishing
Internet communities faster than any construction company in the
brick-and-mortar world. According to a new BUSINESS
WEEK/Harris Poll, 57% of those hopping on to the Net today go to
the same sites repeatedly instead of wandering like nomads from
one to the next. And of the 89% of Netizens who use E-mail, nearly
one-third consider themselves part of an online community. 'We're
at the beginning of an explosion,' says Andrew Busey, chairman
and chief technology officer of ichat Inc., an Internet startup in
Austin, Tex., that makes software for online chats. 'Community
and communications is the next big wave on the Internet..'"
Source: Robert D. Hof, "Internet Communities," Business Week, May 5, 1997
- “Before the industrial revolution, the family was large, and life revolved around the home. Home was where work took place, where the sick were tended and where the children were educated. It was the center of family entertainment. It was the place where the elderly were cared for. In First Wave societies, the large, extended family was the center of the social universe. The decline of the ... began when the industrial revolution stripped most of these functions out of the family. Work shifted to the factory or office. The sick went off to hospitals, kids to schools, couples to movie theaters. The elderly went into nursing homes. What remained when all these tasks were exteriorized was the ‘nuclear family.’ ... The Third Wave re-empowers the family and the home. It restores many of the lost functions that once made the home so central to society. ... the real change will come when computers-cum-television hit the household and are incorporated into the educational process. As to the sick? More and more medical functions, from pregnancy testing to checking blood pressure -- tasks once done in hospitals or doctor’s offices -- are migrating back to the home.”
Source: Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Creating A New Civilization, Atlanta, Turner Publishing Inc., 1995, p. 86
- "In 1980, in The Third Wave, we wrote about the electronic cottage. Apart from encouraging smaller work
units, apart from permitting a decentralization and deurbanization of production, apart from altering the
actual character of work the new production system is shifting literally millions of jobs out of factories
and offices into which the Second Wave swept them right back where they came from originally - the
home. This strange idea was ridiculed after we wrote it by the establishment media like The New York
Times and The Economist. The New York Times ran a page one article dismissing the whole notion as
merely "visionary." Of course, The New York Times today is filled with articles about people working at
home.
It is not just work that is returning to the home. Health care is as well. When our daughter needed
intravenous antibiotics a couple of years ago, she did not get them in the hospital. She got them at home.
Many processes that we once thought had to be done in the doctor's office can now be done at home:
electronic blood pressure measurement, pregnancy testing, HIV testing, etc.
We are now beginning to see shopping at home and banking at home and building communities from
home. We are going to see (or hear) broadcasting from home; we are going to be publishing from home;
we are going to be organizing political protests from home. In short, the home is becoming a more
important place -- or will become a more important place -- than it has been for the last couple of hundred
years. That last bastion holding out against the Third Wave -- education -- will increasingly reenter the
home, at least partially, and despite the bitter resistance of Second Wave educators who operate the
compulsory cognitive labor factories that we still call schools."
Source: Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock in the Present Tense," Aspen Summit '96, The Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1996
- "The Reintegration of Work and Life: I grew up in a society-rural Wyoming-where we were spared the strange
discontinuity between life and work that has so shattered industrial existence. We
worked outdoors in conditions of beauty that others paid large money to
experience. The hours were long, but they were broadly punctuated with enforced
opportunities for peaceful contemplation. One waited for the cow to calve, or the
ditch to rise, or for the team of horses that pulled the feed sled around to plod to
the next haystack. We didn't think of ourselves at being "at work" or "at play." We
just lived.
Among the horrors I contemplated on leaving agriculture was the possibility that I
would have to enter into a condition where I ceased to be my own exactly 8 hours
a day and where time thus relinquished would be my product, with diminished
importance attached to what I actually accomplished during these hours I rendered
unto Caesar.
Fortunately, I was able to leap-frog from agriculture into information, where,
once again, I am always and never "on the job." I produce when I feel productive,
the means of my laptop being always at hand, and hang out when I don't. My time
is my own, to structure as I see fit. ... And, just as I believe the paper-free office will eventually become a reality, I look
forward to the day when telepresence may be enough like being there to render my
travels unnecessary. Meanwhile, I luxuriate in the enriched levels of experience
these travels provide me now.
There is no good reason to structure information work as though it were factory
work. These offices, still run as though they were assembly lines, will empty and
the other folks who live literally by their wits, as I do, will start leading lives of
continuous production and experience."
Source: John Perry Barlow, "The Best of All Possible Worlds," Communications of the ACM, February 1997
- “In Mr. Pfeiffer’s world -- much like that of George Jetson, the futuristic-Everyman cartoon character -- the PC’s will all be linked by a network that controls thermostats and other household functions. Homeowners will be able to call the system and tell it to preheat the spa, activate the microwave oven to defrost dinner or record a favorite TV show. The Internet will allow consumers to easily compare goods and prices from different sources without ever visiting a mall.”
Source: Eckhard Pfeiffer, CEO of Compaq Computer Corporation, quoted in Scott McCartney, “Compaq’s CEO Sees PCs Reshaping Our World Into One Like George Jetson’s”, Wall Street Journal, June 20, 1995, p. B5
- "Once upon a time in ancient Greece, people traveled from miles around to an "agora" in the center of town to exchange
goods and services. Quaint, you say. Maybe, but we still shop pretty much the same way today. We just call it going to the
mall. Now, as the millennium arrives, our centuries-old marketing paradigm is shifting gears. The home - increasingly a place to
work, learn and be entertained - soon will be a center of commerce. Information technology is the impetus. It promises to
put consumers in control of what they see, hear, interact with, and, therefore, buy. Sellers will have to be more aware of
their markets than ever before."
Source: JoAnn Stone, "Buyers in the Driver's Seat," Perspective, Spring 1994
- "In a small room here at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Gary Doolittle chats with a patient, checks her heart and lungs with a stethoscope and then asks her to step behind a screen and disrobe. A common exam, done in a most uncommon way: The patient is in Hays, Kan., nearly 300 miles away. Dr. Doolittle can examine patients across the state with gadgets like two-way television, electronic stephoscopes and long-distance X-ray transmission. It is called telemedicine, and to Dr. Doolittle, this is 'the perfect use of the technology ... Patients get the same kind of care they'd get if they were sitting next to me.' ... Telemedicine could eventually bring back the old-fashioned house call, in a sense, says Ace Allen, director of the University of Kansas Medical Center's Office of Telemedicine Evaluation and Research. 'If you're really sick, you'll go see a doctor,' he predicts. 'But if you just feel lousy -- the reasons for about 90% of visits to the doctor's office -- you'll call up and see the doctor on an interactive video system.'"
Source: Bill Richards, "Doctors Can Diagnose Illnesses Long Distance, To the Dismay of Some," Wall Street Journal, January 17, p. A1
- "As the science of medicine evolves, technologies advance, and socioeconomic changes occur, reshaping the current form of medical care becomes increasingly important. In recent years, changing conditions have emphasized the need for a shift from the current form of hospital-centered health care to participatory patient-centered health care, where medical information and training are brought to patients in the home or in small communities, rather than bringing patients to the hospital where they passively receive treatment."
Source: Michelle Y. Kim, "A Multimedia Information System for Home Health-Care Support," IEEE Multimedia, Winter 1995
- "As we peer into the jaws of the millennium, technology is helping
to resculpt the bedrock of culture--the economy--moving us out of the
Industrial Age and into the Information Age. As we interact with the
world via our newly interactive TVs and computers--27 million U.S.
households have computers--another cultural phenomenon is unfolding: the
trend toward isolation. 'This brings more people back to their home,' said Gerald Celente,
director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. 'A reverse
process is taking place. The Industrial Age took people away from homes
to work locations. At the end of the Industrial Age, people are moving
away from a centralized location to decentralized locations.' ... But some society watchers view the trend toward an empowered home base equipped with modem as a good thing. Celente calls it Techno Tribalism:
'People will be drawn back to their communities, and they'll take more of
an activist role to see that their neighborhood develops in accord with
their belief systems.'"
Source: Irene Lacher, "The Era of Fragments," Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1994
- "For the first time ever in the history of mankind, the wilderness is safer than
'civilization.' There are no crack vials in the wilderness, no subway murders, no
asbestos, no Scuds. Increasingly, we'll enrich ourselves in the privacy of the fortress --
EveryHome in America. The purpose of the fortress? Make us feel safe. Sophisticated
distribution systems will stock and supply the fortresses, the chore of shopping as we
know it will be over -- shopping has to become theater and diversion. The fortress will
be the center of production (bwe'll work at home), the center of security (we'll make the
fortresses intruder-proof), and the center of consumption. Penetrating the increasingly
impenetrable fortress will be the primary challenge for marketers and manufacturers in
this decade."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, Harper Business, 1992, p. 4
- "Lone Eagles are a special breed of knowledge workers. They live and work away from the markets they serve. Some live in urban America. Many move to small towns and to rural America. Most work at home. Lone Eagles are the pioneers of the SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) movement, trailblazers on the Electronic Frontier.
We call these pioneering knowledge workers Lone Eagles after the original Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh, who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic in May 1927. The fiercely independent Lindbergh was a versatile man of many achievements. Today's Lone Eagles have many of Lindbergh's qualities: audacity, versatility, dauntlessness, independence, courage, inventiveness, determination, a quest for privacy and safety, a desire to be their own bosses and an appreciation of natural and cultural amenities. Many have been hit with a mid-life jolt: the loss of a high-paying job in a large corporation, a mugging in a big city, choking air pollution or a numbing experience with an urban public school system.
Lone Eagles are dedicated to the places they choose to settle. They sink roots. They care about the community. They are people who serve on town councils and school boards. Lone Eagles bring revenues into the community, and they don't require tax abatements or subsidies."
Source: Philip M. Burgess and Colleen Boggs Murphy, "Lone Eagles," Center for the New West
- "It’s likely that homes will come equipped with LANs that link most appliances so power companies can adjust electrical peak demand and that enable remote diagnostics to run on computer-controlled devices. Internet services will be readily accessible and interworkable with video services. Computer software will help set up teleconference calls from home, support telecommuting -- which will be mandated in more states where pollution from commuting has become a major problem -- enabling multiparty games. ... Teachers and parents will be able to confer by E-mail, and Johnny won’t be able to claim that there is no homework because you’ll see see it on the Web pages for his school and classes.”
Source: Vinton Cerf, quoted in “The Internet: Where’s It All Going,” Information Week, July 17, 1995, p. 31.
- "Compaq Computer's president and chief
executive officer, Eckhard Pfeiffer, opened this Winter Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) with the announcement of the new peripherals
and software, along with the company's strategy to incorporate CEBus
technology in the coming years. Called Consumer Electronics Bus
technology, CEBus is a computer technology which will be the backbone
of a networked home of computers which provide information, communication,
home automation, entertainment, and security. Pfeiffer told a standing
room-only crowd these changes would be here by the year 2000."
Source: "CES - Consumer Demand Leads the Way," Newsbyte News Network, January 9, 1996.
- "With cable modems you will come to demand wireless connectivity throughout your home or small office, so that your teleputers can link to the Net wherever they are without plugging them into a connector or dialing up a connection."
Source: George Gilder, "Goliath at Bay," Forbes ASAP, February 26, 1996, p. 114
- "Operating a wireless LAN in your home has a stunning effect, especially in conjunction with a a thin, lightweight laptop ... The result is a new kind of socialization. In the past, I would excuse myself from the dinner table, watching TV on the couch, or lazing around the house to go off and work at a keyboard. Being online meant not being a part of the household. But no one complains when you pick up a newspaper, magazine, or book while others are watching TV. Right? Now, I can do the same with the Net and the Web and be no more antisocial than if I were reading a magazine."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, "Wireless Revisited," Wired, August 1997, p. 166
- "The home cacoon will be the site of the future shopping center. All members of the
family will be able to shop from lone location. Instead of going to the store, the store will
come to use, no matter how unusual the product or how frequently needed. On our
screens, we'll be able to hear about the latest new products or styles, or order up our old
favorites."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, Harper Business, 1992, p. 164
- "The means of distribution will be the next consumer-oriented revolution. Direct
shopping from the producer to you -- bypassing the retailer altogether, no middlemen, no
stops along the way. Home delivery will become, not an extra service, but a way of life.
One truck delivering to a hundred customers will be a much more efficient use of
resources than a hundred customers driving to stores. There will be holding tanks in your
house for milk, soda, mineral water (all refrigerated), and bins for laundry soap and dog
kibble, for example, all delivered like home heating oil."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, Harper Business, 1992, p. 165
- "The second wave was the recent industrial revolution, which relied on the availability of inexpensive energy. The consumer was separated from the producer and the producer was in control The chief assets were capital and labor. People consumed the products and services that were produced by firms of ever-increasing size. They tended to accept the notion that the producer was in some way ‘responsible’ for meeting their needs. The electric utilities were responsible for providing electricity and could make all the necessary decisions. IBM was responsible for providing computers. The American Medical Association was responsible for health care. The schools were responsible for education. In the United States, the consumer’s view of success was obtained from other people and institutions, perhaps in part from Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post. This era was at its height during the Eisenhower years -- around 1955. In the Third Wave, the consumer is in control. Information technology plays the role that energy played during the industrial revolution. We will see the demassification of production -- short-run, perhaps even customized production -- based on computers and numerical control. Certain mass-marketing concepts are being replaced by market segmentation, direct marketing, specialty stores, and individual teleshopping via home computers tied into electron sales networks. During the second wave, national economies and markets replaced highly localized communities. During the third wave, a reversal will occur. New technologies are making it possible to produce goods and services localized for regions smaller than a nation. As we move toward demassification and the economy becomes differentiated, more information must be exchanged and used to manage systems and processes. ... The consumer are taking responsibility for his or her health care through nutrition programs, exercise programs, and by taking the initiative in situations such as getting a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. People will no longer allow responsibility for their lives and well-being to rest with other people or corporations."
Source: John M. McCann, The Marketing Workbench, Dow Jones-Irwin, 1986, p. 225
- "These days, patients aren't shy about offering doctors their own second opinions, and often they've done exhaustive homework. An array of businesses like MedCetera have spring up to assist them in their research, with reams - or megabytes - of arcane medical information. ... More fundamentally, the trend is an out-growth of rising patient activism and consumerism, which have combined to knock doctors off the pedestals they once occupied. ... Health Responsibility Systems, Inc. Has logged more than a million consumer searches since October, when it began offering a database of highly technical medical articles through the America Online computer network.
Source: Laura Johannes, "Patients Delve into Databases to Second-Guess Doctors," Wall Street Journal, February 21, 1996, p. B1
- "'Unlike other World Wide Web sites dedicated to medicine and health,
the new HealthGate site is aimed at consumers as well as medical
professionals in terms of both content and search methods,
maintained William Reece, CEO of
HealthGate Data Corp., at a meeting with Newsbytes in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. As a result, predicted the CEO, HealthGate will help to meet the
increasing need for patients to 'become active participants in
their own medical care,' through shared use of the Web site by
physicians and their patients. Patients need to become more proactive due to the 'increasing
complexity of the health care industry,' according to Reece.
Medical services are becoming consolidated, and doctors are
'being forced to see more patients in less time.'"
Source: Jacqueline Emigh, "HealthGate Web Site For Doctors, Health Consumers," Newsbytes News Network article, February 22, 1996
- "A real revolution in auto retailing is slowly starting to happen on-line, and its changing everything about buying and selling cars. ... On-line buyers are a savvy bunch and are privy to information never before available to them. 'In a very short period of time, the last stupid customer is going to walk through our dealership doors,' says Richard W. Everett, director of strategic technologies for Chrysler's sales and marketing operations."
Source: Rebecca Blumenstein, "Haggling in Cyberspace Transforms Car Sales," Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1997, p. B1.
- " Whether burdened by an overwhelming flurry of daily commitments or stifled by a sense of social isolation (or, oddly, both); whether mired for hours in a sense of life's pointlessness or beset for days by unresolved anxiety; whether deprived by long workweeks from quality time with offspring or drowning in quantity time with them--whatever the source of stress, we at times get the feeling that modern life isn't what we were designed for. And it isn't. The human mind--our emotions, our wants, our needs--evolved in an environment lacking, for example, cellular phones. And, for that matter, regular phones, telegraphs and even hieroglyphs--and cars, railroads and chariots. This much is fairly obvious and, indeed, is a theme going back at least to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. But the analysis rarely gets past the obvious; when it does, it sometimes veers toward the dubious."
Source: Robert Wright, "The Evolution of Despair," Time Magazine, April 28, 1996
- "Pop culture is dead.
At least pop culture as we had come to know and love/hate it in the
recent past, when it dressed, entertained and molded America en masse.
When culture popped in the 1960s, the entire country would tune in to
'The Ed Sullivan Show' every Sunday night, forging a vocabulary for the
next day's national dialogue around the water cooler.
Three decades later, such solidarity is unthinkable in the face of a
500-channel future.
'The most interesting part of the story could be the disappearance of
pop culture,' said New York trend analyst Edith Weiner. 'It has to have a
history communicated through some generational mechanism. What we
have now are flashes coming and going everywhere. That is not culture. Those
are fads. . . . We have become a potpourri of cultures, and we have lost
much of what was our culture.' ... In trendspeak, this is the era of fragmentation when it comes to pop
culture--or pop cultures . Trend watchers call this a nation of
subcultures. With technology getting higher and higher, commerce can
cater to smaller and smaller audiences. Fragmentation is linking arms
with another late-20th-Century phenomenon--a sharply stepped-up rate of
change--to create an explosion of culture pops.
"
Source: Irene Lacher, "The Era of Fragments," Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1994
- "We don't sit out on the front stoop any more. We don't watch the first 15 minutes of
Carson before we hit the sack so we can laugh together at work the next day. We don't all watch the Ed
Sullivan show on Sunday night. Our local newspaper is beleaguered by the pressures of steadily
decreasing readership, higher costs, and less advertising.
We don't even work in the office any more. Between telecommuting, time on the road, and staying in
hotels, the once-reliable office routine is a vanishing reality for more and more Americans. Dozens of
other common experiences have disappeared from our lives, but I'll focus on the changes driven by
technology.
The advent of 50 or more channels on cable has completely stratified our television viewing experience.
Our community is defined as never before by our age and our interests, not by our physical location. The
evening newspaper is extinct, and the televised evening news may be on the endangered list, supplanted
by all-news channels. As people begin to turn to the Internet for news or to future sophisticated hybrids of
television and the Internet, the advent of personal pages and customized views makes any commonality
of experience even less likely."
Source: Bill Machrone, "The End of Common Experience," PC Week, October 22, 1996, p. 85
- “The future of personal computing is as a tool to connect what Watts and I call ‘communities of strangers.” these are people linked together based on common ideas and values -- shared identify -- rather than social proximity. This is an absolutely revolutionary change. By using the computer to find people who share your views, you can live in whatever kind of world you want. Reality is no longer a defined constant. It is a choice. There are lots of kids today whose best friends are people they’ve never met. they spend 20 hours a week in chat rooms with other kids. Over time, as they share their interests and lives, they develop a shared identity -- a real sense of community that has nothing to do with where they live. It’s a difficult adjustment for parents. A father sits down with his kid and says, ‘Who’s our best friend?’ And the kid says, ‘Sabbit from Bangladesh.’ The father says, ‘But what about Jake next door?’ And the kids says, “I don’t have anything in common with him.’ The father is mystified: ‘How can you have something in common with a kid in Bangladesh and nothing in common with the kid next door?’ But that’s exactly the point. Politically, the world is still organized around geographic entities called countries. Socially, it’s reorganizing itself around shared collective interests -- communities of strangers with their own language, rituals, heroes, icons.”
Source: Jim Taylor, Vice President of Global Marketing at Gateway 2000 and author (with Watts Wacker) of The 500-Year Delta: What Comes After What Comes Next, HarperBusiness, 1997, interviewed by William C. Taylor, “What Comes After Success,” Fast Company, December-January, 1997, p. 84
- “The virtual society is not only inevitable; it’s real, it’s here, it’s growing at a phenomenal rate, and it impacts virtually (no pun intended) every facet of our lives. ... a culture once based exclusively on physical contact is being transformed to one where goods and services are accessible without face-to-face contact with other people. Technology enables this transformation toward a virtual society which involves change from the physically oriented structures of the 19th century to the non-physical oriented communication structures (structures without constraints of place and time) of the 21st century."
Source: Paul Gray and Magid Igbaria, “The Virtual Society,” OR/MS Today, December 1996, p. 44.
- "America is a consumer culture, and when we change what we buy -- and how we buy it --
we'll change who we are."
Source: Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, Harper Business, 1992, p. 4
- "Today the majority of people around the world live in cities. ... Thirty years from now, the big cities may be dying very fast. Downtown office buildings have become dysfunctional. As information and ideas have become mobile, the kind of work that doesn't require contact with customers or contact with other professionals - in other words 75 percent of the work in any organization - doesn't have to be done downtown. For 300-odd years we have had a continuing, occasionally interrupted real estate boom. It was slowed down by depression, but not stopped. That boom may be over for good."
Source: Peter Drucker, quoted in Kevin Keyy, "Wealth Is Overrated," Wired, March 1998, p. 161
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