[8765] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Electronic Cafe (not strictly com-privish)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Michael White)
Fri Dec 3 18:56:00 1993
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1993 15:48:01 -0800
To: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke), com-priv@psi.com
From: moonshadow@cs.stanford.edu (Sean Michael White)
That may be how MacWeek covers them, but Kit and Sherrie, the owners of
Electronic Cafe International have a very different view of their work.
They do *not* think of their cafe as a broadcast system. It is an
interactive system where people can go and communicate informally with
others. If someone is packaging it as Broadcast TV, it isn't them.
-sean
At 2:27 PM 12/3/93 +0500, John [Francis] Stracke wrote:
>Just saw something in MacWeek that struck me as a major technology
>perversion of the type we've been talking about: a company called
>Electronic Cafe International that's set up a network of 60 cafes
>around the world, linked by ISDN (or, in one case, T1), where they use
>videoconferencing software on huge monitors, so that the entertainment
>is artists in various cities collaborating. Now, this is a neat
>thing; if it became common, it'd lower the barriers to collaborative
>art. This is good. But it's being packaged as broadcast
>entertainment, just like TV! Instead of setting up, say, a global
>coffeehouse with an open mike, they've opened a bunch of feeding pens
>where people come in and get treated like cattle for $10 a pop.
>
><sigh> Maybe, once the novelty wears off (what do you guess? two
>months? once the entertainment isn't live, nobody much cares about the
>tech behind it), they'll try a coffeehouse.
>
>/===========================================================================\
>|John (Francis) Stracke | My opinions are my own. |
>|InSoft, Inc. |==================================================|
>|Mechanicsburg, PA | Dave Barry for President! |
>|francis@insoft.com | He'll Keep Dan Quayle. (OK, it's old) |
>\===========================================================================/
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moonshadow@cs.stanford.edu "I'm bein followed by a moon shadow"
