By JULIA SELDEN
Remember when Sandra Bullock ordered a pizza from her computer in “The Net”? Remember how evil “praetorians” had the power to completely erase her identity, all from information they retrieved through electrical wires? Remember how you wondered if that could really happen?
People have concerns about the Internet because it is an unknown, said Pete Kruckenberg, vice president of engineering at inQuo, Inc.
In reality, sending information online is far more secure than other means currently available, such as paying for a service by giving your credit card to an employee, Kruckenberg said. Because of the sheer volume of information being transported online, the chance is slim that someone’s information will be picked out of millions of other pieces of information, he said.
The concern is still valid, however, because widespread online commerce is a likely event of the future.
“There’s a lot of money exchanged online already,” said Brain Ware, vice president of sales and marketing at Coastlink. And he expects the numbers to increase astronomically. By 2000, he expects 15 to 20 percent of all commerce to be done online.
Besides online purchasing, Kruckenberg and Ware see other big things in store for the Internet, although “it’s anybody’s guess what things are going to be like a year from now,” Kruckenberg said.
Mark Clement, an assistant professor in the BYU computer science department, thought the biggest application would be video-on-demand, which he expects to be utilized within the next five years. Video-on-demand is like pay-per-view, except the viewer chooses what he wants to see at the time he wants to see it, instead of being restricted to pre-determined programs and showtimes, Clement said.
Kruckenberg expects the Internet to provide vast opportunities to bring people together, “almost taking them back to the proverbial good old days” of talking on the porch, he said.
And while the Internet will certainly decrease face-to-face communication, it will not replace it, much like the business/lunch meeting didn’t replace the office meeting, he said.
“There’s an appropriate time for any type of communication,” he said.
Some Internet users are debating “pull” and “push” technology, according to a report in Newsweek. Pull technology involves actively browsing the Internet for desired information, while push technology comes to the user, in applications such as Pointcast.
Pull advocates fear push sites will turn the Internet into another giant networking, TV-like system, where smaller sites are left without a place to be seen. Levy believes, however, that the two technologies will be able to exist side-by-side.
As for exotic new Internet applications, some consumers don’t know what to expect next.
“It already has so much that it can do,” said Lisa Steinmetz, a sophomore majoring in Near Eastern studies from Idaho Falls, Idaho. “I’m sure there’ll be improvements … on what they already could do.”
Steve Hall, a senior mechanical engineering and math education major from Bettendorf, Iowa, said more will be done with the Internet in the future and that “technology always costs less over time.”
