Internet Dreams : Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors Mark Stefik; foreword by Vinton Cerf MIT Press
"Before we build, we imagine. And the trajectory of imaginations-past tells volumes about futures to come. Stefik has assembled a brilliant collection of visions to ponder. Read closely, and you will catch a clear glimpse of the possibilities that lie ahead." -- Paul Saffo, Director, Institute For the Future
The Wired Neighborhood Stephen Doheny-Farina Yale University Press Oct.96; $25.00US; 0-300-06765-8 240 pages
Doheny-Farina argues that once we begin to divorce ourselves from geographic place and start investing ourselves in virtual communities, we further the dissolution of our real, dying communities. He speaks out in favor of a movement called civic networking, which promotes the proliferation of networks that originate locally to organize community information and culture and to foster pride in and responsibility to our neighborhoods.
Degrees
of Freedom
Postmodern communities have the qualities of postmodern texts. They
are tentative and temporary. They are formed spontaneously, and individuals
can enter or abandon them according to need and inclination. These qualities
already belong to mainstream American culture. Mainstream culture is already
what we might call the network culture, where people define community by
networking, forming and breaking liaison. It contrasts to the hierarchical
culture of social class and religion that flourished in Europe prior to
the Second World War and had some impact on the prewar United States, although
it never flourished here. There are few hierarchies and relatively little
stability left in American culture. It is a culture in which one out of
three households moves every year. It is culture in which it is not usual
for people to change their religious denomination three or four times in
a lifetime, a culture in which when a Catholic and a Baptist marry they
often split the difference and both join the Episcopal church.
Landow, Hypertext Studies LANDOW'S HYPERTEXT
the proclamations of Ludditism come permeated by irony, since literary scholars as a group entirely depend upon the technologies of writing and printing. The first of these technologies, writing, began as the hieratic possession of the politically powerful, and the second provides one of the first instances of production-line interchangeable parts used in heavily capitalized production (Landow 1992b, 168)