In the 1990s the personal computer revolution turned into the social computerrevolution. The thrill of having sophisticated computer power on your desktopturned out to be just the beginning, once your machine could connect to everyoneelse's via telephone lines. There is a global computer the size of humanitytaking shape.
Now that everybody can publish their own interests to a worldaudience on the Net, we learn irreversibly that the world is far stranger andmore interesting that we would ever guess from magazines, books and broadcastmedia. Our sense of the world is altered and, oddly enough, in an optimisticdirection. Two simple-seeming devices -- search engines and links -- have madesearch-space on the Internet more exciting than outer space. It is more currentand diverse than any encyclopedia, and it's inhabited with real people. Howeverremote-seeming your query with a search service like Alta Vista, within minutesyou find yourself on the home page of someone who has made that subject theirlife's obsession.
What he or she has to say raises questions you would neverhave thought to ask. And they provide links to even more astounding sources. Websurfers experience a giddy sensation of boundless variety and boundlesspossibility. How the world talks to itself is permanently changed. In thejargon, it has shifted from one-to-one (telephone) and one-to-many (broadcast)to many-to-many (the Net). Power is taken from the editors and distributors inhuge over-cautious corporations and handed to no-longer-passive, radicaleveryone.
Individuals on the Net initiate and control content to suit themselvesand those they can interest. (This makes governments nervous.) The Net is anantidote to broadcast news. The news tells you about a shocking earthquake andyou're depressed.
The Net gives you the people who are helping the earthquakevictims and provides firsthand reports: "I was out in the garden when ithit, and I noticed that suddenly the ground was covered with earthworms."Some have described most activity on the Net as merely "vanitypublishing" or "advertising." Those are left-over broadcast termswhose meaning is changed in the Net environment. Grass-roots"advertising" is what assembles new communities of interest and wholenew ecologies of knowledge. If we had any idea how wildly interesting"vanity publishing" could be when it is cheap and plentiful, we wouldnever have condemned it.
