Sterling tersely states that the "Information Economy" is not about data, its about attention. He believes that the "signposts" that tell you what to access -- what to pay attention to will be critical. He thinks that tools need to be developed to prevent "spin-doctors" (who he calls the evil anti-librarians; the "dark side" of the Force) from ruling the information universe of the web. He believes in information filters, not attention filters. Sterling also is passionate about the idea of "Deep Archiving" -- he wants to see books archived electronically for the VERY long term. As he says "if we are going the put the Library of Congress in our hip pocket, I would like to see us put the Library of Congress beside very canister of nuclear waste".
He also supports the development of open and interoperable standards that allow for the broadest possible participation by the user community; although the design should be sophisticated it must emphasize ease of use in order to serve the public interest. This will ensure that individual NII users, who have proven to be the single most significant source of imagination and evolution of the Net, continue to be able to contribute and push the limits of the net envelop.
Sterling does not see hardware as a significant issue saying "the glass boxes that we recognize as computers won't last much longer -- already these boxes are becoming flat screens. In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition"
