HOME & FAMILY: "Web-Connected" Society

Just as TV clearly changed family life, society, commerce, and politics, so will the Web, except in different ways. The Web extends our personal space well beyond our living rooms to the entire planet. Your PC is your world. And so the world is yours. In Web world, family must be seen as a network. As relatives disperse, the Web becomes the gathering place where electronically-extended families come together.

Everybody connected to the Web will have their own homepage. It will serve as a mobile, ubiquitous personal portal that gives them global tele-presence. Wherever you are, you will be able to interact with, and immediately focus in on, your "life stream." The Web thus creates a new pathway for life - for work, education, shopping, recreation, and much more. Each family will have the world at its fingertips for children's homework, for cross-border online shopping, for tele-working, for staying in constant touch with friends, relatives, and colleagues, for running a family "prosumer" business, and so on. The Web literally will be the "intercom" of life.

The ubiquitous global Web thus becomes the new "social glue" that holds society and families together. In turn, the more virtually connected we become, distance shrinks but our explorable space expands. That leaves us with only one fixed point of reference - the family home.