On : Fri Mar 28 14:22:30 CST 1997

Brian, your point about the potential effect of videoconferencing is well taken. Those concerns are, I think, supported by what we see happening with early use of teleconferencing.

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but there is a program out there now called CU-SeeMe, a teleconferencing program invented at Cornell. (If you Yahoo search for it, you can download a copy.) With that program and one of those little cameras, you can hook up to 'reflector' sites on the internet and chat with other people. (At this stage, the only way to find reflectors is to look at a list on a web page, and most of those reflectors will not work.) Many of the reflectors, of course, are pornographic, and you have to pay to get in. (The reflectors will send you a message to go to their home page on the web, and make sure you have a credit card handy.)

At first, I was extremely impressed by the technology. When you finally get on an operational, free reflector, your screen will start to display several windows showing the faces (in full-motion video, although very jerky and slow) of all of the people on the reflector that have cameras.

Of course, as I was pondering ways that a properly managed and marketed reflector site might make an interesting business, a window popped open on my screen, and the user had aimed the camera at something other than his face. (Sorry, don't know how else to get my point across.) After visiting a few more reflector sites, I learned that, at each of them, it was only a matter of time before something like that happened.

Now, I'm not convinced that the technology has any really valuable use, other than business teleconferencing (ie. using CU-SeeMe as a kind of visual conference call.) I really can't think of a way that the problem of the public reflectors can be solved. And, maybe the same problem exists (although, thankfully, not visually) with web communities in an all-text environment: you just don't have any idea who you are talking to until it is too late.