The Future

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major -- perhaps the major -- stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable
that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
--Jean Françoise Lyotard

Even the early peoples depicted their experience on cave walls with their images of the hunt flickering against the torchlight. Perhaps these examples I've discussed of multimedia sprout from the human need to creatively connect with one another, to richly imagine ourselves, and to share our stories.

While there is the possiblity for multimedia to remain open to collaboration, it is unclear what our next step will be. The vast landscape of cyberspace is perhaps like any new territory: there will be room for abuse by those interested in centralizing its power for profit, and there will be room for those who wish to stifle the free exchange of ideas.

Philosopher Jay David Bolter is concerned about the rhetoric of an "democractic" future. He is skeptical of the perceived egalitarianism of virtual culture, and questions which groups and genres will be marginalized by new media because of lack of accessibility. Furthermore, Bolter does not foresee a stable virtual community but rather cultures of constantly shifting interests, and wonders what this means for the individual seeking a sense of place in cyberspace.

Lévy, on the other hand, is more hopeful. He sees hypermedia as an unfolding arc in our cultural evolution, and suggests that "cyberspace constitutes a vast, unlimited field... designed to interconnect and provide interface for the various methods of creation, recording, communication and simulation." This global movement to digitalization, virtualization and collective intelligence is also a shift in biological movement to greater complexity, to larger human nervous systems and bigger brains. In other words, our evolution is now being left up to us.

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