MEMORANDUM
To: Members And Friends
NFB R&D Committee
From: T. V. Cranmer, Chairman
Subject: A notice posted to NFB SIG
Date: May 26, 1994
Our local BBS has a Special Interest Group where topics of interest
to NFB are discussed. The following message was posted to the SIG
earlier today.
Begin post:
With the coming of the computer age, blind people find themselves
in a favorable position to participate in affairs of the world.
Some call the environment created by the interconnection of
personal computers the Global Electronic Village. Every blind
person with and address in the Global Village has innumerable
opportunities for direct participation in Village life.
>From my Village home, I see these areas of participation to be the
most important:
E-mail, short for Electronic Mail, provides nearly instant
communication to every other Village address.
Conferenceing: Lets me participate in small group discussions of
personal interest or in Global conferences open to everyone in the
Village.
Recreation: From the privacy of my Address, I can play games, read
books, listen in on gossip and news, and generally have
fun probing about the nooks and crannies of the Village.
Research: Several tools are available to assist me in ferreting out
information on every imaginable subject. The Library of Congress,
it is just one of the many libraries in the Village, lets me look
at 26 million documents. Or, I can search through the articles of
hundreds of magazines to find stories of interest, and then I can
read the stories or capture a copy into my own computer.
I should tell you that the Village is real, that it now has a
population estimated to be fifteen million human beings, and
several million computers, and hundreds of thousands of public
locations accessible to Village residents. I should also mention
that most humans living on the planet, have no idea of what the
Global Electronic Village is nor any idea of how they can become a
resident.
Somehow, the R&D Committee and the NFB in Computer Science must
find ways to raise the level of awareness of these matters among
all blind people. I also believe that it is time to develop plans
for workshops, seminars and similar activities. This will be a
lead item for discussion at the R&D Committee meeting on Tuesday
evening, July 5, 1994. One more good reason to come to the
National Convention of NFB.
End of forwarded message
P. S.
You don't have to wait till July to sound off, if you are in the
NFB-RD forum. Do it now!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:03 PST