When television was invented, the futurists predicted that it would change the world. They also said the same thing about the advent of the Internet as we know it today. They were right on both counts, but how right? Despite the assumption by many observers that television would essentially copy the same programming as radio, the president of RCA offered this prediction to the Saturday Evening Post in 1929: “Mothers will attend child welfare classes in their own homes. Workers may go to night school in the same way.”

Obviously, such a world never came to pass, and television is today mostly harmless fluff. By the time the Internet started to become mainstream, the predictions were still utopian, but tempered with the understanding that commerce would play a huge role.

Writer George Gilder wrote in the National Review in 1994: “Telecommuting, teleconferencing, telemedicine, teleputing will change from buzzwords into basic fabric of business and life.”
The future, as they say, is now, and Gilder’s prediction sounds much more accurate than RCA’s. The Internet has created a whole new world for business, building infrastructures to reach new customers faster than ever before. On the other hand, though, the Internet is also packed even tighter with harmless fluff that used to be TV’s monopoly.

This month’s issue explores a number of ways you can make those online time-wasters into productive assets for your company and even the world.

Our Social Networking column talks about ways companies can use the community-building aspects of Facebook, MySpace and other sites to reach out to potential customers. In Get Real, Brian Salgado looks into an addictive word game that fights global hunger as players increase their wordiness.

The lofty aspirations of the Internet may be lost among the spam e-mails and pop-up ads, but don’t let that discourage you from realizing its potential for your business.