Entering the infosphere
Michael Vlahos. Journal of International Affairs. New York: Spring 1998. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; pg. 497, 29 pgs Abstract

(Summary)
The world is entering a historical period of big change. Big change in complex and chaotic, and almost impossible to view from an objective distance by any of its participants. Big change is defined as migration and revolution combined. Migration is human passage, the move from one place of identity and belonging to another, and it is the central action of big change. Revolution is the ratification of the place that change makes. This is achieved through social political theater, in which a new elite takes on the authority of leadership, and in which elite and all society mark their emergence from the passage of big change. Revolutionary theater is necessary to resolve the complex conflicts unleashed by migration. The theater of great events, with its ultimate focus on the politics of vision and authority, is culture's ritual conveyance, whereby society is moved through a shared, symbolic passage so that it can accept all that has happened. The Infosphere is the vehicle of change which has come to be called technology.

The world is entering an historical period of big change. Big change is complex and chaotic, and almost impossible to view from an objective distance by any of its participants. Big change is defined in this article as migration and revolution combined. Migration is human passage, the move from one place of identity and belonging to another, and it is the central action of big change. Revolution is the ratification of the place that change makes. This is achieved through social political theater, in which a new elite takes on the authority of leadership, and in which elite and all society mark their emergence from the passage of big change. Revolutionary theater is necessary to resolve the complex conflicts unleashed by migration. The theater of great events, with its ultimate focus on the politics of vision and authority, is culture's ritual conveyance, whereby society is moved through a shared, symbolic passage so that it can accept all that has happened.

This article focuses on big change in the United States, knowing that the change will eventually sweep over the world. But the initial change in Americans' lives raises several existential questions:

How to come out of this migration and still feel a sense of larger community and identity?

Who among many eager competitors will form the new elite?

How will authority be transferred, in terms of legitimating a new elite and a new vision of American life?

What might we imagine as the theater of change, its politics, our future history's great events?

THE INFOSPHERE: BIG CHANGE TODAY

The Infosphere is our vehicle of change-a vehicle we have come to call technology The argument that shifts in technology are intimately intertwined with shifts in human life is commonplace. Not so familiar is the argument, advanced here, that these shifts create a new human place and that society, eventually, migrates to it. Even beyond that is the argument that another such shift is beginning and that migration has already begun to a place called the Infosphere. A place which has almost no material aspect and has not even entered the collective mindyet.

What is the Infosphere?

The Infosphere is shorthand for the fusion of all the world's communications networks, databases and sources of information into a vast, intertwined and heterogeneous tapestry of electronic interchange. The global fusion of networks changes the character of each individual network. Networks will no longer serve simply as the medium through which people in different places can communicate, enhancing their in situ activities. The global fusion of networks creates a network ecology. A place in which people can gather and do business. People will be able to conduct their activities increasingly in the global network ecologyl-the Infosphere.

The Infosphere has the potential to gather all people and all knowledge together in one place. This is what makes the Infosphere so compelling. The place itself is not "real," meaning, it is not part of our normal, physical world. Operating in the Infosphere is disconcerting today, but people accept its alien environment because it offers tremendous advantages. It gives people the ability to meet and access information anywhere, all the time. And people can meet in groups, share information and make agreements, just like they do in situ. The difference is that they are not site-bound. Eventually, as the environment becomes more familiar, it will become less alien.

Business transactions and financial exchange are already migrating to the Infosphere, which is rapidly becoming the new global marketplace. People well-equipped to enter the Infosphere today are finding that they can do business while reducing onsite overhead dramatically, happily pruning business travel and exponentially expanding customer geography Thus economic advantage is driving the evolution of the Infosphere. Capital expansion and competitive awareness means that, in the near future, most enterprises in the developed world will be doing business in the Infosphere. And as the Infosphere becomes essential to enterprise, it will become essential to most people as well. But people will not make the Infosphere a part of their lives simply because it is business. It must be validated in the life of society.

Peoples' migration to an alien environment requires a shift in social patterns and spirit. Because the Infosphere is fueled by technology, people are still taught that the Infosphere is a communications network. Then they discover, upon entering, that it is a place for them. Like any human place, architecture does not make a place, people do. The migration of people to the Infosphere depends in part on people seeing it as important to their life and work. But their willing migration also depends on people seeing it as a human place that is comfortable, familiar and social. When people collectively reach this crest of recognition, their migration will bring us to a cultural watershed, and that is when the Infosphere will become central to the life of society.

Creating societies through business enterprise will be the decisive factor. Enterprises are taking their wide area network (WANs) and local area networks (LANs) and moving them into the ecology of the Internet. Call this the transubstantiation of the network, from the office to the Infosphere. Once there, these new "intranets" begin to evolve yet again, into "extranets." Interior corporate societies are dynamically reconnecting with themselves and, in turn, with the world, through the relational technology metaphors constantly being created for the world wide web. This means that, from coffee mess to corporate plaza, the new meeting ground of each corporate community will migrate from the office to the intranet/extranet. People will find that they do business more effectively on their intranets, and that they feel closer to their firm and their officemates in the ether. The first real communities begin at this point.

A replacement for the ethos of the industrial era will be validated through social relationships in Infosphere enterprise. This leading-edge effect in cultural adaptation is not new. It was, in fact, integral to how American society adapted to the Industrial Revolution. What happened then, and what should happen now, is that microbehaviors, values and norms, established and ratified in business enterprise, will be melded into a template for the value system of an Infosphere-centered society But business is the conveyor, not the creator, yet it is a powerfully effective conveyor of values in the American ethos. We should not cavil at the thought of business renewing ethos, because enterprise-established norms in a new environment are not any less valid than norms, values and behaviors established by other institutional sectors in national life. In the American experience, the establishment of norms by business is the path most accepted by Americans. The legitimacy of new social patterns in American life will be grounded in Infosphere enterprise.2

The human migration to the Infosphere represents an historical shift on several levels of significance. It is a true transhumance 3a movement of human society to a new place, much like the colonizing of the New World, while still connected to the old. It is thus a migration from, as well as toward, the in situ and material patterns of all human relationships to something very different and more complex. This entails a migration from long familiar patterns of culture. Human culture has always adapted to fit new environments, and the change is often as difficult as it is exhilarating, because it involves discarding many cherished and familiar ways of life. However, it is also ultimately comforting, because the high stakes we see in making the change work motivate us to find ways to preserve what is really important.

The Infosphere changes us through a strange, but not alien, blending of technology and culture. We think of technology as something apart from us, as creating discrete artifacts that we put to use. But the Infosphere is not discrete; in fact, it is potentially all-encompassing. Technology's network ecology brings fundamental change to us, but we do the changing. Ultimately, we decide what we want to be in the Infosphere. And the Infosphere is perhaps the most plastic of all human places. Advances in processing, networking and delivering will allow us to extend and enrich the world of the Infosphere at will. But it is important that the Infosphere exists today, however primitive it feels to some. It exists because its network technologies, processing, operating and data systems have matured enough to create a place we can enter. Access is just open enough, connections are robust enough, security is strong enough, viewing is rich enough, navigating is easy enough and its resources even now seem infinite.

"Place" is essential to understanding the change. Big changes in human life, the emergence of big cities early in the Industrial Revolution, are expressed through a new web of social relationships and social meanings that themselves are expressed and understood within the metaphor of a new human place. The new tools build the new place, but what really changes is human society: how we organize ourselves, and human ethos: how we think and behave.4 So the hypothesis that our new tools, our information technology, are building a new place, the Infosphere, is consistent with the patterns and process of periodic historical shifts in human life, such as the rise of each new form of "civilization," with its "citizen" and "city." In short, our new tools are building a new place and we are moving there. The technologies of the "Information Revolution" are not simply altering our world at the margins by improving how we communicate and share data between old places, but they are creating a new world that is an actual place to which people are migrating.

This is why it is useful to think of the Infosphere as the new city, not because it mirrors our nostalgic iconography of past cities, of skyscrapers or boulevards or triumphal arches, but because it has the spirit of a city. Cities are its citizens. The physical site is but the venue for bringing people together. Place is people; the physical aspect of place is what sustains people there and, to some extent, symbolically represents them. The idea that place is people and that its physical aspects are supporting, not central, is critical to understanding the Infosphere . . . because the Infosphere is not a physical place at all.

HOW DO WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE? THE THRESHOLD OF PLACE

How is "Place" important?

It has been suggested that what we think of as place, the physical form of a human gathering, is really a set of supportive social queues. Place provides physical support, of course-a roof against rain, a wall against enemies-but also, symbolic support. The form and embellishment of place pursues the celebration of identity as much as it does the physical sustainment of life and activity

What makes a place a place?

We think of place as something forever physical, like the ruins of a Roman city, or a frescoed, Paleolithic cave. But place is above all a metaphor; it does not exist of itself, but because it signifies us.

We make a place to tell us and others that this is where we are. Place is the metaphor of our connection, remembering how and where and when and why we are together as a society Place helps us organize our intercourse and it is deliberately shaped to memorialize us.

So anything can be a place. Let me give some examples. Have you ever been in the dark wild wood, hurrying to make camp? You are surrounded by unknown, you are nowhere and you are alone. And then you build a fire. Suddenly, you are there. You have arrived at a place; your place, marked by a human hearth. You are no longer lost.

Consider the Bushman of the Kalahari. Each night, they make their place in the grass:

At last we noticed on the other side of the tree two shallow depressions scooped in the sand and lined with grass, like the shallow, scooped nests of shore birds on a beach - the homes of the families, where people could lie curled up just below the surface of the plain to let the cold night wind which blows over the veld pass over them.5

Or go down into any city's labyrinth of concrete bunkers; the worst, lingering legacy of industrial war: the parking garage. There, in the cold damp, with the whining of a generator, are two young women. They are sitting by the exit stoop. Two big, takeout coffees keep them company. They are, by late decree, smoking there. But their little circle of quiet talk, scented by tobacco and java, drives out the chill. It is warm, this place they have made, almost comfortable, because they make it so.

So when people on the Internet say that cyberspace is a place, it is. They may be linking in the ether, mingling through energy packets that end as flickering words on terminal screens. This ether is no less a place than Stonehenge or Versailles.

But it is not yet the new human place. It is selective, temporary and limited. For the ether of cyberspace to be the next human place, it has to do what each new human place has done for all people. The first human place was the hearth (of which our campfire is living artifact). This is why the first and most important deity of the Romans, which they held on to even after they chose to ape Greek ways, was Vesta, goddess of the hearth. They kept her hearth, too, in a shabby, but treasured, little temple right in the heart of Rome's first Forum. This is why we like replaces in our homes and why woodsmen still make an ancient living hawking fagots.

Even when glaciers forced some of us to move into mountains, it was not the cave, but the hearth, that was home (just as those women's cigarettes were modern, moveable hearths). The next human place came with the next big human move to agriculture and animals. Now home became a wall, a kraal that embraced and protected us. Mound and hill forts used walls to protect us, but those walls also defined us. Until the demise of the city enceinte in mid-19th century Europe, walls stayed with us. Real places had walls.

The third human place came with the next big human move to the cities. The new Jerichos and Troys and Mycenes were bigger than Neolithic villages or Chalcolithic towns, but they were different in another way. They had a marketplace; bazaar, bourse or agora. This was the first networked place, bringing into one place pieces of others, so that people were not simply connected to a place, but their place to the sea of all places.

Since then, we have gone through other iterations of place: from brick mill slums and crystal palaces to malls and condo-canyons. But what place is and what place does remains the same.

It is possible to show how all human places enhance society and its ethos by supporting key functions of society in action. This is true of the most primitive places, like the Bushmans' circle in the sand, as it is of the most sophisticated, such as the new "cities" of the Infosphere. It is interesting that both Kalahari and Digirati share a definition of place that is nonmaterial yet somehow still compelling. This is because they both support the life of society. "Life," in this context, can be viewed from two vantages: from the actual activity-patterns of people interacting, which can be called a society's functions,6 and from the vantage of the quality of interactions. Place is essential in supporting both.

The Infosphere is a distant reality, but we move quickly towards it. What passage must we make before we arrive? Think of barriers, thresholds, watersheds, images of landmarks en route, great passes on the map. Here are five: "Works" Watersheds, Entering Thresholds, A Threshold of Being, Barriers to Congregation and Barriers to Sharing.

"Works" Watersheds

"Works" is suggested here as an image with four senses: ) buildings and structures; 2) a place where things are made; 3) the parts that make up a machine; and 4) the whole lot, everything.7

Works are the entire physical substrate of the human citypublic and private. For the Infosphere, this means the entire network and all its terminals, servers and nodes. But it is also how the network thinks, how it moves and manages the electron traffic that is its true substance. And for the Infosphere to serve as a human place, this traffic must move quickly and truly

We talk about the Infosphere works today with words like "bandwidth" and "megahertz" and "operating systems." Think of bandwidth as the moving of info-electrons across the network; think of megahertz as a shorthand for sending and receiving them at the place where humans sit, in front of the screen; and think of operating systems as the guiding gray matter, spread across the Infosphere, billions of brain cells, decomposing and then reassembling our new reality before our eyes.

For the big change to happen at all, they must become much more powerful. For example, bandwidth has been stuck for the average consumer for several years. They connect at home with 28.8 or 56 kilobytes per second (kbps) modems. However, you can only creep into the Infosphere at 28.8. At 28.8, all the bleeding edge elements can be demoed-streaming video, video conferencing, Internet protocol multicasting, three-dimensional visualizations and virtual distributed environments-and people can play with them, but even the most elegant algorithm will not get the job done.

Now, what does all this mean? In essence, for the Infosphere to become a place, it must move a lot more bits and bytes-about a hundred times more. The reason we don't understand this is that as a society we have been stuck at 28.8 for more than two yearsan Infosphere eternity! And we have come to think of that as the norm. Few of us really know the language of cyberspace, because few of us have really experienced its magic, but we need to, soon, before today's Internet begins to look like status quo.

The threshold is somewhere in the low millions of instructions per second (Mip) range, from one to three. That is one to three megabits in and out, all the time, guaranteed even for peak traffic times. That is enough; xDSL8 will do it; cable modems will do it; and that is just three years away.9

Megaherz (Mhz) growth, in contrast, is sure and steady. Moore's Law, that processing will double every 18 months, has not let up yet. By the time Mip bandwidth is in everyone's reach, they will be reaching out with processors three to five times more powerful than today's standard-bearers. But processor power should not be assumed. The current Intel ad campaign peddles faster processors by promising more computer fun and games. But people won't go on buying computers just because they can push the drag race pace even faster in "Burnout!" or feel even more like they can touch the shimmering landscape of "Riven." People will replace their 600 Mhz machines with quad-central processing units at 1,000 Mhz, if these hot copper wafers' can handle all the new bandwidth, putting them farther and faster into the Infosphere. Part of the Infosphere's promise is that this kind of capability, like the next bandwidth jump, is also only about three years away

But speeding Info-electrons need neuron-guidance. Each physical piece of the Infosphere has an operating system, like a single neuron in the infinite Infosphere brain. The truth is that the systems which run most people's computers are the silted-up, bloated ken of micro-kernels from another era, the late-70s!ll This includes Windows 95, the more-than-dominant operating system (OS), which has a genetic hostility to Infosphere-processing that is today perhaps the biggest barrier of all. To run and play in the Infosphere, everyone needs a new OS, or, in coded OS lyrics, a "multiprocessor optimized, multithreaded operating system, with a 64-bit file system, direct access graphics capabilities, pervasive multithreading, and a high-efficiency modular I/O." This could take two to three years at best.12

Entering Thresholds

We will enter the Infosphere through an instrumentality, an object. This object is likely to be whatever becomes of the PC. Moreover, the personal computer must mutate if the Infosphere is to have a real gateway.

The desktop metaphor is a familiar social bridge that has allowed people to approach their PC as a sort of office synthesis. The Internet created the need for a new metaphor and began the deconstruction of the PC. The personality of the personal computer is now split. The dominance of the browser over the office blotter in desktop design reveals a form of Infosphere evolution. The PC becomes a gateway into the new place. It is a personal gateway, or medium, through which we move and connect with others in the Infosphere. Like the physical world, we enter this digital world well-equipped for business, with notepad, pen, diary, etc., all in digital form. These tools we once called the PC are now reassuming a more traditional guise as accessoriespersonal assistants-that go with us as we do business in the Infosphere.

But then, one asks, what happens to the familiar form of the PC? In order for it to become a portal, a gateway, it must lose its intervening presence. Over the years, the PC has grown into a sort of desktop shrine: its central processing unit (CPU) is called a "tower," and the massive cathode ray tube is called a "monitor." These objects themselves became the focus of our veneration, like a shrine. Now, to move us into the Infosphere, the PC must change its current form, and shed the three-dimensionality that stands between us and a new place. It can do this by becoming a flat screen only, much like a true window or a blackboard. 13 We do not think of the window when we look through it; nor do we appreciate the board as we write on it. They become transparent.

Entering must be easy, like turning on a TV Navigating, once the desktop is shrugged, should feel more like real movement, a kind of flight. This means ditching the keyboard along with the monitor and the tower and the desktop. We can navigate with a handheld, like so many of the "remotes" we are easy with today. Voice commands will be part of the shift-no more Shift+Ctrl+Fl +...

Finding information is the Infosphere's central activity. But the maddening, "Sounds like ..." vehicle of Internet research, the search engine, remains a barrier to discovery Search engines are like card catalogs in old libraries. If the only way you could get at a book was through the card catalog, you are at the mercy, not just of someone else's idea of how to organize knowledge, but also of the protocols for using their organizing system. If, by contrast, you could go directly into the library stacks, you would still have to deal with the organizing system, but you could look for things in your own way. You could go to a general area and see what is there. And because you could take in with your eyes whole topics at once, you would tend to find not only what you thought you wanted, but also, what you didn't know you wanted but now know you need. You would have the opportunity to see better the whole of human thought in a single knowledge niche.

The Infosphere desperately needs to open up its infinite stacks and create visual, fluid search avenues. These are on the way, like Perspecta's "three-dimensional fly through system for data visualization," where the searcher flies "from topic to topic, and as they move through space, more information is disclosed."'4 This could take between three to five years.

A Threshold of Being

Visualization in three dimensions, changing moment-to-moment as in real time, is to the flat, objective distance of video what Rembrandt is to Matthew Brady. It promises an immediate sense of place, enticing, beckoning the viewer to enter. They are presented as places. They are not "desktop" pictures or "screensavers," like old Polaroids stuck into the side of a blotter. They are more than digitized vistas; they are immersive environments that we can enter, move around in, gawk and bump into things in three dimensions. By the iron rules of Infosphere custom, these places must be given an awkward title: in this case, "distributed virtual environments" (DVE).

These invented places offer rich colors and free rein to fantasize. But they are also leashed in our minds to cartoon memories that undercut their very authority to serve as a place, let alone as a substitute for "the real thing." They are also, more subtly, undercut by the rather abrupt limits of our own imagination. In one showcase for "virtual worlds," companies like Ziff-Davis get a ziggurat and Bacardi gets a bar, but the realization is almost shockingly pathetic, like iridescent Lego blocks in the hands of a primitivist. We are reminded that even in a place where digital marble can have infinite plasticity, texture, color and chiaroscuro,lS the Infosphere will not escape the harsh limits of taste and skill. It may even become the apotheosis of dreck.6

But even with what we can do now, there are staggeringly beautiful evocations of place. Now, without the comforting lateVictorian baggage of a time machine,l' we step through into another world..

The slim launch has been run up on a quiet Nile beach, beneath a stand of palm. Its chequered ochre and jute sail is not yet furled and sun glitters up and down taut red rigging. Rising up everywhere on ground are crenellated, mud brick double walls, fifty feet high, cut every twenty feet by curtain towers, stretching toward the clear sky.

What we see is Sesostris' great fortress of Buhen, on the Nubian frontier, built nearly 3,000 years ago. Through a three-dimensional vector model and associated texture maps, the ramparts of Buhen were captured for the last time, forever. What we really see are stills of an early virtual reality effort, generated on an Intel 48666DX2, and a Silicon Graphic's competitor-engine, the KubotaDenali, now as antique to us as those Nilotic curtain walls above! Great effort was required then; but these images, created in 1994, are but an ubiquitous taste of the texture of future Infosphere landscapes. Today's engines can deliver beautiful digital vistas, just as they can cop-out with tasteless and seedy settings. The Infosphere landscape is infinitely elastic, and, therefore, infinitely suggestive.18

Barriers to Congregating

But how do we imagine ourselves in the new place? While it is easy to conjure up real-seeming terrain, lifelike representations of ourselves are more difficult. At the moment, it is not even really possible.

What is possible at low bandwidth (28.8/56Kbps) are little, colorful and suggestive dolls. We call them avatars-in Hindu myth, the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate formbut they do little to convey the divine. They are more like poppets, and who wants to speak with, let alone do business with, a maumet?

Barbarous grafts are possible, like putting a live video head on a doll's unmoving body But to achieve fidelity of face and form, you must get wired into an expensive software package through an elaborate harness that conveys your physical movements and facial expressions. So it gets even worse.

Five years from now it could all be different. We will buy clothes with embedded sensors to show our every move; a circle of minicams around our screen will translate and project our face as a three-dimensional Infosphere object; and garden-variety anthropomorphic programs will effortlessly provide the real-time animation and lifelike texture-mapping of our digital bodies.

But must we wait for our digital selves to arrive before we truly enter the Infosphere? How elaborate must it all be? Do other people need to look like real people, even themselves, before we can talk to them? When will we feel comfortable enough in a virtual environment, at ease enough with our virtual selves, to do regular, social things?

Online gaming networks show us that congregating is not necessarily about looking real, that maybe "reality" is the wrong approach. While academic designers and engineers, such as those who write about virtual humans and virtual worlds,'9 weigh possibilities, hundreds of thousands of kids are living in the Infosphere every day It is where they spend the most precious time of their lives, their free time.

This is no ephemeral phenomenon. The August 1997 issue of the net has a guide to the 50 top online gaming networks.20 To give just a hint of the scale of this activity, just one of these networks, Kali, has 160,000 registered users playing on 350 servers in 54 countries. Yet it is not simple game play; not simple activity What is happening is pure social interaction in cyberspace. It is the human inhabitation of the new place on an unprecedented scale. What makes them so compelling is that they are another place, places of fantasy you can explore and in which you can play with your friends forever.

The most popular game, Quake, creates a neomedieval world, a fantastic, labyrinthine landscape. The three-dimensional (3D) engine is relatively simple, but the effect is highly satisfying for the user, who can easily navigate as if walking; one can look up and down, scan, run, jump and fall. It is eerie, but far more arresting than any "serious" simulation or virtual environment. Once in, it is hard to leave. And this is important, because it establishes the appeal of place and a naturalness being there. It is not an experiment, and it is not just for professionals. Regular people can play there; and even more importantly, they want to play there.

But it is the play that then assumes the social importance in this entire human phenomenon. Once you enter this place, you encounter others, some monstrous and meant to be killed, and others that look like you and are also meant to be killed. Immersed in the environment, you feel these others as real presences ... because they really are other people playing. The pervasive context of social legitimization makes it possible for the crude digital persona in the "Quake realm" to be invested subjectively with all the characteristic aspects of a person.

The online games are not games at all, but complex social interactions in a virtual place. It does not matter if this social interaction is a metaphor for mortal combat, it nonetheless forms the basis for complex, continuing group culture-a group subculture whose central activity occurs in the Infosphere. For example, many thousands of diehard Quake players have formed "clans," cyberspace gangs that wage great, heroic campaigns in "Quakeland." Their clan seats are on the Web. Here is some clan dialogue, in characteristic dialect, from one site:

They play under many different names, I won't list them as they do like their privacy But there's at least three or four guys using the name Flitzer, Trainee, and *, and *, and * : ) They all connect from the same location so if you see them... RUN LIKE HELL.

I'm pretty sure this is one of those Flitzer boys, although you never can tell. They claim to have many captures of Cardiac getting gibbed...Bah !

June 30th, 1997 Lan Party Results - a brief note

Hey ! Just got time to do a quick update, as I'm still pretty busy The Lan Party was way cool, with Guardian taking the Monitor and Amoeba barely beating Crizzard for the 3DFX Prize. Also a special announcement, The Ancients have a new clan member. BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID!

Here some Demos from Saturday's "Monitor Playoff", they were filmed with Clanring's QuakeTv function, and I dare say it rocks.21

Four things stand out here: the ease with which the players inhabit cyberspace; the rich rituals of group, identity and camaraderie; the high sense of shared focus; and the immediacy of action and involvement. They revel self-consciously as young primitives in their new world.

the net started its online gaming survey with a caution on "latency" in multi-player games, averring that "many companies are battling to deliver the holy grail of gaming: low-latency, multiplayer, real-time multimedia action."2 But in user terms, they have already done so. People using 28.8 are playing by the hundreds of thousands, in spite of latency problems. Multi-player, first-person, three-dimensional gaming is achieving what DVE demonstrators only suggest: a social place where people live in the Infosphere. Gaming thus creates a potential market wedge that goes beyond any other Internet experience.

There are four reasons why gaming could represent an authentic social point of entry into the Infosphere: First, large numbers of people come to "live" in DVEs, feel at home there and look forward to meeting others there. Many have come to create primary social groups, at least during adolescence, that center on their activity in the gaming DVE. Social patterns are more normative than the chat-based "communities" that characterized social connection during the early Internet. These people accept current technical limitations, but they want more. This creates an expectation that translates into real market demand. These people are typically in their teens or 20s. They are the market of the future.

Barriers to Sharing

Business-by-avatar may have to wait a bit, at least until the "Quake Clans" rise to corporate leadership. Face-to-face video is another matter altogether. It is pervasive in Ti/T3 office LANs and WANs, and in the formal business settings that come under the codeword "professional," video works.

Video, on any screen, remains a cool medium. Does "desktop video" play a role in pulling people into the Infosphere? Its current moniker, "desktop video,"23 hints of its current limitations. It is a pocket-picture on the blotter, where callers can watch each other, like animated cameos. But is it still effective for business?

The picture was just a little window, and the video, at about 10 frames per second, was a bit jerky. But it was good enough for the face-to-face contact to add something to our conversation."24

The very "coolness" of the video, as opposed to the telephonic conversation, may add to its business appeal. Telephone talk is intimate by nature, making it a valuable assistant to the business meeting, but not a comfortable substitute. Video, in contrast, immediately assumes the formality and sense of occasion that attend a business meeting. This means that video-conferencing and conversation can potentially facilitate the same sense of closure and decision that are the social goal of face-to-face meetings. If desktop video achieves this level of business utility, then business ubiquity will follow, encouraging widespread application and a broader, popular migration.

What of the cultural "barrier to entry" created by this cool medium? Like streaming video, interactive video carries a social penalty by imposing a sense of separation from and objectification of the subject in view. But the flat picture does not hold back people's entry into the Infosphere. Once video-conversation becomes ubiquitous, like streaming video, it will create an expectation, and a potential demand, for a greater feeling of social closeness.

TV bequeaths a tradition of celebrated and idealized onscreen interaction, in which mass audiences have dreamed of taking part for 50 years-"Hey, I'm on TV!" Now, with their videocam hookup putting them on-camera, there is a subtle, cultural squeeze, in which a dying medium gives a final boost to the newborn. TV-video's iconography-is thus not only easy and familiar, but remains exciting still. It can be a bridge taking us from the cool medium of the "Tube" to the living world of the Infosphere.

Video is a social bridge that will help escort us into the Infosphere. And video itself will metamorphose-a Macluhanesque25 heating-up of the cool medium. The flat image will become three-dimensional, as batteries of mini-cams surround us. It will then be grafted to the very human avatars we will build at will five years from now, creating, again, another convergence.

HOW DO WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE?: DEMOTIC & HIERATIC RESISTANCE

Societies that face big change must first overcome resistance to change. The defining moment of the l9th century big changethe Industrial Revolution-was the embracing of change itself. They did it. How do we do it? Overcoming is the historical outcome. But the actual process of overcoming resistance during the Industrial Revolution meant: taking on the ruling establishment and its institutions, which themselves were leashed by a style and a spirit that could not cope with big change; identifying a new elite-much of it from within the old-that could take on big change and overthrow the old regime; forging a new place made by change where the rest of society could eventually follow; preserving continuity in social identity amidst the chaos of change.

Overcoming resistance requires cultural creativity in the face of chaos, because change means chaos, and chaos brings fear. No one can keep equanimity for long in a place where the very things that tie other things together seem to be coming apart. Big change brings fear. There is the fear of living in a strange place-the fear of being alone, having no ties to the people and things that support your very identity But the worst fear is the fear of loss-losing the things that define us, the things we have lived for and the things that make life meaningful. The fear of loss is the hardest part of change to face. It is shared by both elite and ordinary people, even though the fear works its way differently. Fear is what resistance to change is at its root. Successful big change is all about getting past fear.

The Hard Part: People's Fear

What does the possibility of loss really mean to people today? What, exactly, are they afraid will happen?

There is the fear of losing their familiar world-the emotional comfort of place. The place "you grew up in" tells us about the need for sanctuary and repose that place offers. It tells you who you are by assuring you of where you are. There is the fear of losing their sense of self, the tie to job and work. Identity in America is still tied to title-job title, that is. Company marques and hierarchy pegs tell us who we are in terms of how we belong. There is the fear of working alone, isolated in some job-purgatory Job society is like family; it creates daily intimacy and attachment within groups that give meaning through the continuity of everyday connectedness and commitment. And finally there is the fear of losing ties to family, community and nation. Americans seek layers of belonging-and in the industrial era, more were needed. Nuclear and extended family; union and club and association; church, charity and community service; the job.

So the Infosphere roars in to take all this away?

In truth, all of this is in decline. So much of what we cherish, what Americans like to call "the good life" has been stripped away at the end of the industrial age. Where is the sanctuary in living in a standard treeless American development, where instead of the town square all life gravitates to a consumer temple-city we call the shopping mall? Where is identity in an American job world that was torn up in the 1980s by ruthless multinationals desperately seeking efficiency, "restructuring" traditional American industrial labor in the name of global competition? Where is the intimacy in the faceless labyrinth of the American office, where the hum of fluorescent lights, computer terminals and recycled air mingle in a symphony of stress? Where is the belonging, in an American society that spends hours everyday alone in automobiles, which could elevate "quality time" into a motto of family virtue and that apprehends the sum of its lifeconnections, now scattered to the winds, through telephone "Friends & Family" and the occasional jet-hop?

Americans fear what the Infosphere will bring, because they believe that whatever it is, it can only be worse. Americans have identified the downside of progress, and they see it as the loss of "the good life." They earn more money, they live longer, but life itself is somehow inestimably poorer.

Is it possible that the Infosphere could actually rekindle intimacy in work, connectedness with family and community and a sense of belonging to our larger society and wider world? People can work at home. Families might actually come to live together, rather than visiting for a few hours in the evening. Businesses, freed of commuting and rigid office appointments, could have more time for face-to-face team-building, leading to higher levels of trust in relationships. And all of us might, if we choose, reach out and join many different communities, enriching our identity.

But it is also possible that the Infosphere will continue the decline of the Great American Middle Class. Migrations, after all, break down long-developed patterns of life. When we leave the old places, we are leaving behind places that have matured for us, that represent a developed and familiar human existence. The new places are a rough contrast, terrible because they have not yet been softened by inhabitation.

This is what happened when people came to the cities of industry. Migration led to higher wages for many, but it also led to terrible slums and shorter lives. Millions in Britain, pushed by the enclosure of the "reformed" countryside and pulled by the lure of a better life in the mill towns, wandered into town and city, and simply overloaded them. Public services like water, housing and sewage were inadequate. People in London needed 17 gallons of water a day; in 1815, they got two. Death rates shot up in the cities from constant epidemics of cholera, typhus and pneumonic infection. Urban death rates in 1850 were often 50 percent higher than in the countryside.

But then they started to drop. In fact, the death rate in England fell significantly and steadily after 1760. The ills of industry only flattened it for a time, and then, after 1860, it plunged. Things eventually got better, the longer people lived in the new place.26 This is what Americans fear. They fear the migration because they sense that it will lead to privation-not in surging death rates from cholera, but in a plunging quality of life. American people have three problems with the Infosphere. First, they fear that it will tear down their way of life; second, they have no idea how it might lead to a better life; and third, they conflate the dislocation of migrating to the Infosphere with the discontents and decay of the late-industrial age: the decline of family values, job security and the good life.

It will be hard to tell people the good news about the Infosphere, because the good news can come only after the bad. And this bad is nothing like braving the Donner Pass near winter, nor coming to America and living 20 to a room on the lower East Side, nor mining anthracite all day 1,000 feet down, with your 10-year old pushing the cart. Yet it doesn't matter; these comparisons are wrong. What matters is the stress a society feels-leaving behind not just its old place, but the freight of its old dreams. The shock of dislocation, the harsh realities of the encampment that precedes the city, the fight to make it "a decent place to live." People ask: Why must we make this journey? Why not just make things better?

It will be hard to explain to them that there is no turning back, that the reason the old "good life" is failing so fast is that its entire body and spirit are dying. How will we witness the possibilities of a new world, without shirking the truth about the hard times and struggle to come?

This is the challenge to a new elite. This also is why the old order cannot long stand. The issue, as for all times like these, is how? How does a new elite rise to leadership and how does the old come to stand aside? Here the existential fears of the whole elite subculture-the society which includes both the current ruling establishment and those who will form the new elitebecome a big factor. Of course the old establishment fears that big change will strip it of power and authority, this fear is one of revolution's givens. But does some aspect of the ethos of the entire elite subculture as well fear big change?

The Hard Part: The Rulers' Fear

If the elite are the bringers of change, who in the elite opposes it? American elites are rushing to embrace the Infosphere; for example yuppies over the age of 60 are the Internet's highest growth segment. The Luddites are just where you would expect to find them in 1800-in the ranks of the poor, the less-literate. Even establishment Lictors and power lunch apparatchiks gush a bit when talking of E-mail and websites.

The elite's fears are different from those of other people. They are not afraid of losing their jobs. If these people are not the Infosphere's pathfinders, then they are its pioneers-its first, main users. They know how to wrest opportunity and wring income from the new economy

The original Internet elite might dream of keeping the Infosphere an elite place: a rarefied government research and academic think tank sort of place. The much larger national elite has taken it over now, moving quickly to turn it into a commercial web of corporate intranet and extranet. There is no danger of this emerging Infosphere breaking out of elite control-it simply will never return to the Eden of precious online "communities."27 Lamentations of "Commercialization!" mean only that the Infosphere will become a populist place limned by basic tastes, but its growing corporate character means that its workings will remain in elite control.

Elite society doesn't fear the Infosphere as much as it frets over the "quality of life" there. This is no simple apprehension, because the elite lifestyle is not what it appears to be. It is not a "lifestyle" at all, but a complex set of social rituals and carefully displayed badges that help to distinguish it and set it apart from ordinary Americans. It is an elegant way to identify class formally in a society whose ethos and traditions officially abjure it. Call it the elite's "good life(style)."

So their lamentations tend to center around debates over whether aesthetic experiences in the Infosphere will ever equal live performance, or whether it will lead to the end of reading and of books, or whether it debases intimacy Much of the rhetorical energy of the early digirati was expended in an attempt to assuage these fears.2

Arguably, lifestyle intimacy and connectedness were far more degraded in the late-industrial period-people cut off from people by TV and Walkman, connecting by phone message. The Infosphere's promise of intimacy is in enhancing the closeness people can feel with each other when it is impossible to physically connect. And if thinking about the Infosphere's compass triggers hyper-agoraphobia, entering a single space there can be as intimate as closing the door of a private room.

The elite subculture already understands that the Infosphere is an enormous boon to their lives. They are the ones who now can choose to ape landed gentry in Jackson's Hole, or like a gentleman of leisure sip exotic java at Misha's Old Town Alexandria, one finger's touch away from a wireless laptop hookup to the NASDAQ. What they do not see yet is that their biggest problem in entering the Infosphere is not with their own frettings, but with the people's fears.

HOW DO WE GET TO AN INFOSPHERE ELECTORATE?

An Infosphere electorate implies migratory change within two compasses of identity-work and world view. They are intertwined domains of identity, but not identical.

A portrait of American group identities at the very beginning of the Infosphere Era was compiled by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press in the autumn of 1994, coming out just before the last imperial insurgency and the GOP taking of Congress, and just after the debut of the world wide web-the Infosphere's first light.

This full-color snapshot of the American electorate, "The New Political Landscape,"29 described Americans according to their place in society and in popular culture-going on to correlate this vantage of identity with more traditional benchmarks of job, ethnos and income. It identified ten groups, from "right" to "left," where the first figure shows adult population, and the second shows registered voters:

Enterprisers 10 percent to 12 percent: Wall Street Journal Upper

Moralists 18 percent to 20 percent: Family Channel Middle

Libertarians 4 percent to 4 percent: Upside Upper

New Economy Independents 18 percent to 19 percent: Grace Under Fire Middle

Bystanders 8 percent to 0 percent: MTV Bottom

The Embittered 7 percent to 7 percent: Roseanne Bottom

Seculars 9 percent to 10 percent: All Things Considered Upper

New Democrats 10 percent to 8 percent: Friends Middle

New Dealers 7 percent to 8 percent: Honeymooners Bottom

Partisan Poor 7 percent to 8 percent: Roc Bottom

This is how they can be roughly translated into class-degree, job, income:

Elite: Enterpriser, Libertarian, Secular: 23 percent to 26 percent

Middle: New Economy Independents, Moralists, New Democrats: 46 percent to 47 percent

Bottom: Bystanders, Embittered, New Dealers, Partisan Poor: 29 percent to 23 percent

The numbers may look skewed, because they show only adults; elite families have fewer children, and constitute less than 20 percent of the overall population. The Cold War fundamentally changed the definition of the American elite. Tradition made the American elite a menagerie of thousands of local elites-but the Cold War's creation of an Imperial center also created, over five decades, a national elite network defined to some extent by income, but increasingly by graduate and professional degree, and most importantly, by a shared world view. The contemporary American elite is a relatively unified, coherent subculture, not unlike that of Europe. It is an inner-differentiated elite-underscored in the Times Mirror classification into Enterpriser, Libertarian, and Secular-but with a shared cultural substrate.30

Today it is the elite that inhabit the Infosphere almost exclusively. Times Mirror identified only three groups with high computer ownership and use-all elite. Intelliquest estimates that there are 51 million adults online,31 and a Harris survey shows that 22 million of these have incomes over U. S. $50,000. To these must be added nine million in college, graduate and professional schools who are clearly members of the elite subculture.31

As long as the Infosphere remains an elite playground, it only reinforces class divisions in the United States that translate directly into today's sour fin de siecle political scene. Two thresholds must be passed before the Infosphere brings big change to American politics: Work must shift decisively toward an Infosphere economy; and political issues must divide along an Infosphere fault line.

WORK: THE ANVIL OF BIG CHANGE

How will work, and the labor force, move into the Infosphere? The American Electronics Association survey, "Cyberstates," which limits itself to an overview of "high-technology industry," offers some statistical insights into what the rising Infosphere will do to American work, and thus to American electoral attitudes. The survey says that "high-tech" is the largest manufacturing employer in the United States, employing over four million people. And the average wage of high-technology workers was 71 percent higher than a private sector worker in 1995. But that was nearly three years ago. In just five years, employment in software and computer services jumped 35 percent, to over one million.33 Twothirds of national economic growth is in information-related enterprises.

Let us draw that curve conservatively, but in the direction of the Infosphere. What it tells us is that much of the nation's business will be cyberspace-based by 2010. But let's not go that far out. Let's go halfway there, or less:

Stock trading: 60 percent of the discount brokerage industry before 2001.34

Music - 7.5 percent of the music market or $1.6 billion, by 2002.35

Groceries: 12 percent, or $60 billion, bought in the ether, by 2007.36

Commerce: $327 billion total in the Infosphere in 2002, up from $8 billion today37

How would an Infosphere workforce look in a future where the American economy is centered in cyberspace?

The highest value-added work will be in creating content: discovering, analyzing and providing strategic information; developing enterprise networks; honing enterprise management and building enterprise teams. This group will grow out of traditional executive/professional job arenas. Call them Knowledge Creators.

Knowledge Managers will provide a different level of services in the Infosphere: managing networks, databases and search engines; developing and deploying content; supporting strategic research and analysis; and leading teams.

High-technology builders are what manufacturing for the Infosphere becomes, supplying and serving the massive networked architecture-the physical ecology of cyberspace-that makes the new world run and hum.

Knowledge workers help us take many traditional retail services, from sales to marketing to customer support, into the Infosphere. This group would include aspects of caregiving and social assistance that could be provided more effectively in the Infosphere, including many government services.

What does that leave?

Traditional, high-end services. We still want to visit our doctor in person: Or do we? It has become so hard to find M.D. facetime that many of us may prefer a ten-minute, no-wait consultation to resolve most minor medical issues. Do we need to see a lawyer in person? Maybe not, if we already know him or her. A shrink? Their practice, with its necessary couch, may survive the longest.

Physical services will always be available; they will just cost more. That is true today, in any HMO, without the Infosphere's benefits.

Traditional manufacturing? Things will still be made, but there will be no more traditional manufacturing. There will still be some highly skilled people hovering over the robots that build our cars, but most work in the auto industry will be in the Infosphere, from selling to financing to working out the best ways to design and build at the lowest cost. The only truly traditional manufacturing will be in the craft and restoration business and a truly huge growth market to boot, as Infosphere anomie builds a nostalgia-boom.

Traditional human services. We will not see an Infosphere barber shop for a long time, nor will people forsake the local Renaissance Festival for a virtual fiesta in 15th century Siena (they'll go to both!). Restaurants will boom, because people freed of commuting will choose to live in places where they can walk to a Bistro and sip espresso by a quiet street. Recreation will boom, because people will want to get away aggressively from the enfolding screen. Health care employment will keep growing too, where Infosphere efficiency will make care by touch more possible.

All of this should happen. But there will be throngs in society that the Infosphere initially may leave behind. The marginal young are one of these big groups. A young cohort at the bottom-the "Bystanders" of the Times Mirror survey-promises to be the first Infosphere poor; able to play but not able to work in the Infosphere economy They are not only limited by what they don't know, but by how they behave. They are our failure to civilize, to socialize our own. In a highly transparent economy ruled by responsibility, the marginal have little to offer except risk. We know there are about 12 million of them between the ages of 18 and 30, and that they don't vote. Unlike aging segments of the poor, or the classic welfare poor or the politically engaged poor, they have not established a pattern in the life of society; and yet they are the most likely group to migrate with the rest of us into the Infosphere. Will its opportunities energize them, chasten and encourage them? Perhaps they will give up and retreat into gaming worlds and other fantasies, like the Circus-dwellers of Rome.

BUT WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR POLITICS?

The trajectory of Infosphere economic expansion soon creates a much bigger Infosphere workforce. Those working in the digital ether will soon come to outnumber those of us who labor in everyday air. Like Frederick Jackson Turner giving the official historians' announcement of the end of the Western Frontier, and of one mythic American migration, this moment will be awaited; its significance endowed before it happens.

Before this watershed is reached, the Infosphere workforce will pass several plateaus. The first has already been passed, where the new workforce has left behind its original geek-elitism, with its breathless, online communities and noble "netizens."38 The next stop on the way up is where the new workforce takes down forever its yuppies-only sign. Before the majority of us come to work there, the Infosphere will have become a place of many world views, drawing from many subcultures.

Instead of an aristo-infosphere workforce "Enterpriser/Secular/ Libertarian," the next wave of migration will be "NewEconomyIndependents/Moralists/NewDemocrat's," swelling the High-Tech Builder ranks, but even more so in the booming Knowledge Worker sector. Here is where our excursion into the "feel" of Infosphere life becomes important. People who live in the Infosphere will be the richest, youngest, hardest working, savviest and most arrogant elements of America-next. Their world will represent a divide to those that cannot make the move-the older, the poorer and the less-skilled. Not that the new world will be without its new poor. But will these just be Bread & Circus citizens, classic dependents, or, along with the smug and savvy will the Infosphere also throng with itinerants, haulers of digital garbage and dreary data-miners-the young, eager and unskilled?

What is important is that the new groups will have new political world views, and the new world views will no longer resemble former realities. The Times Mirror Ten by then will have passed into political lore. There will be an elite of former Enterprisers, Libertarians and Seculars and they will remember their former selves, like Reagan recalling his youth as a New Dealer with distant, studied nostalgia.

The elites will be the big winners in the early Infosphere economy Whether they conjure up winning politics will depend on whether pieces from the old industrial middle also see themselves as winners.

But this is not even a question. Call them "pieces" from the old industrial middle because that is what the great migration to the Infosphere will do, is now doing, to the complex living tissue of the industrial world: breaking it down, tearing it apart. People will be losing all of their ties to a way of life, and politics will show how they feel about it. Their political discontent will mirror the loss, struggle and early disillusion of the big move. Things will not look good for a long time, because people will be unhappy Political issues will swarm around this unhappiness and, even more, around its source: The Infosphere.

POLITICS AND THE INFOSPHERE FAULT-LINE

Political competition gathers around issues, and small issues gather together into a single issue, the existential heart of political contest. It may not be the whole of what is at stake, but it represents that whole. The Issue, before 1861, was slavery. The Issue, in 1896, was free silver. The Issue in the New Deal era, which only ended with Clinton's celebrated obituary, was government.39 Let us suppose that the Infosphere itself is the next big issue. We are, after all, looking at a decent interval of historical time, not as long as a classic industrial makeover, which took two whole generations, or the centuries it took for the cities to spread across the classical world, but maybe what we can think of as an entire generation.40 So 20 years after a whole old world will have gone to bed, its place in our lives will have moved, remorselessly, from centrality to sentimentality That means a generation of political upheaval. It is the theater of our future history

But we do not know how to write a future history Thinking about this revolution and migration, we are wracked by impressions. These are all we have: premonition mixed with fantasy; shadows and twilight like a dreamscape of things to come. Here are some of this dreamer's impressions:

Few could see the Infosphere coming, back in the late 1 990s. This was partly because what existed, the Internet, still looked like a toy, partly because the ballyhooed bandwidth takeoff looked hopelessly stalled and partly because people still thought what was happening was just about better communication.

For the Infosphere to be born, old concepts and institutions had to die. The telco's had to die. They stood for the old world of voice telephony and copper, they had the tools to build the Infosphere but could not put them to use. People did not feel comfortable in the Infosphere right away. It did not become a place right away either. Business ratified the Infosphere. The new workplace made it a place.

The first Infosphere was put up in breathless haste. It was at once stunning, alien, fabulous, bizarre, overwhelming and overwrought. It was an "unreal city, " a "city of dreams. "41 The Infosphere reawakened a sense of absolute wonder as it swept us up into mass disorientation. Those who built the new Infosphere economy were the ones who first reaped its great harvest. Wealth distribution skewed away from even growth across income levels. The Infosphere economy seemed to have created a new class system in American life.

But then, as the Infosphere pulled everyone in, this picture changed. Like the maturing industrial world, those who entered later, or without advantage, began to make up ground. And as the Infosphere matured, opportunity evened out.

An unexpected boon: Old traditions and cultural legacies that seemed near death at the end of the old age, were recreated in the Infosphere. Life and spirit and experience no longer with us could be preserved in the ether, available to all, still teaching, still inspiring. So history and art and romance thought lost, were restored.

Old leaders fell; not easily, just surely. And among them were not just the old political leaders of the TV age, but the early network and Internet leaders, those once called the Digirati.

But now vision grows more murky. Who are the new leaders? Where do they come from? What calls them forth? How do they speak, how do they witness the great struggles of identity and becoming in the new place? And what new ideas of human connectedness do they hold up, what spirit do they capture in us?

All we know is that these things will happen, and we will be a part of them because they will happen in our time. But what we make lies in our readiness to embrace it.

[Footnote]
Thinking of a human network that integrates people and their activities as an ecosystem is a metaphor first bequeathed to capitalism by Michael Rothschild in Bionomics (New York: Henry Holt, 1990). This modern variation on the classical comparison with Nature can be pasted onto the Infosphere, like an Amazon in the ether. A complete world, from silicon fiber substrate to digital canopy.

[Footnote]
The underpinnings of American ethos are treated authoritatively in Rodney Stark, Sociology, 6th Edition (Wadsworth, 1995).
It is the way of all shepherds and their flocks, to live seriously and productively in two places. Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2, no. 87 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) said of transhumance: "It is a way of life combining the two levels, and at the same time a source of human migration." With the Infosphere, we will not leave our material ties behind but move back and forth, combining and inhabiting each at different times and in different seasons.

[Footnote]
Richard Barrett, Culture and Conduct (Wadsworth, 1984).

[Footnote]
Richard Lee, The Bushmen of the Kalahari (New York:Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1984).

[Footnote]
Barrett.
The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, on Compact Disc: 1989.

[Footnote]
xDSL stands for digital subscriber line," where the "x" is a placeholder for technical variants, like ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line). XDSL squeezes bandwidth from copper phone lines, up to 1.5 mps. From discussions of industry leaders at the conference Cyberspace and the American Dream IV (Aspen, Colorado: 15-17 August 1997). 10 Refers to IBM's use of copper rather than aluminum-based chips. White Paper, "The Media OS," http://www.be.com/products/beos/mediaos.html.

[Footnote]
The OS struggle will intensify with the arrival of Rhapsody, and Java's bid on the network computer. Windows NT will push the outer limits with NT 5. But finding a standard among them and Old Man Unix? Outcome uncertain. Gas plasma displays are now available, exhorbitant, and up to 40 inches along the diagonal. But they are thin and flat, like a blackboard or a window-the twodimensionality that lets us enter into three. For some pictures, go to http:// www.business.com/products/fujitsu-2 1-plasma-display html.

[Footnote]
Whit Andrews, "Alternatives to Hit Lists Include Ability to 'Fly' Through Data," WEBWEEK, 15 September 1997, http://www.webweek.com/current/undercon/ 19970915-lists.html. Some "data" encourages eye-flight. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art has 38,000 works of art. Imagine "flying" through its collection. See http://www.mma.si.edu.

[Footnote]
5 In the sense of "The effect of light and shade in nature, e.g. in a landscape," an important concept for how well the Infosphere transubstantiates nature's sense of "place."
16 http://www.lyrastudios.com/cyberspace/index.html 17 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895.

[Footnote]
Http://www.learningsites.com/EarlyWork/buhen.htm. Richard C. Waters & John V Barrus, "The rise of shared virtual environments," IEEE Spectrum, 25 March 1997.
Marc Saltzman, "Super Games!' the net, August 1997, pp. 21-40.

[Footnote]
" http:\jord.sbc.etu\dragon\frames.htm 22 ibid

[Footnote]
23 Stephen H. Wildstrom. "Desktop Video"
24 ibid

[Footnote]
IS Marshal Maduhan is the futurist aud of Libr Without Sheva (London: Rr ou. 1977),

[Footnote]
John Langton & R.J. Morris, Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780-1914 (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 16-22.

[Footnote]
27 For a of couple testimonials to the brief heyday of the elite "cyber-community," see Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow, "Community in Cyberspace?" Utne Reader (March-April 1995) pp. 51-64; for a look at the much more demotic, and commercial-centric online gathering places of today, see Seanna Browder, Peter Elstrom and Robert Hof, "Internet Communities," Business Week (5 May 1997) pp. 63-85. ze Mark Helprin's evocation in Forbes ASAP (2 December 1996).

[Footnote]
29 The Times Mirror Center for the People & The Press, The New Political Landscape October 1994

[Footnote]
See "The Overclass," Newsweek (31 July 1995). 3' From NUA Surveys, 15 September 1997, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/. 32 From a Lou Harris poll, Amy Cortese, "A Census in Cyberspace," Business Week (5 May 1997) pp. 84-85.

[Footnote]
33 Michaela Platzer et al., Cyberstates: A State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry (American Electronics Association, 1997) http://www.aeanet.org. 34 Piper Jaffray estimates, from NUA Surveys, 15 September 1997. 35 Jupiter Communications Net estimate, from NUA Surveys, 15 September 1997. 36 Andersen Consulting estimate, from NUA Surveys, 15 September 1997. 3 Forrester Research report, from NUA Surveys, 15 September 1997.

[Footnote]
For a couple of testimonials to the brief heyday of the elite, "cyber-community," see Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow, "Community in Cyberspace?" Utne Reader (March-April, 1995) pp. 51-64; for a look at the much more demotic, and commercial-centric online gathering places of today, see Robert Hof, Seanna Browder, and Peter Elstrom, "Internet Communities," Business Week (5 May 1997) pp. 63-85.

[Footnote]
39 James Sundquist, The Dyna of the Party System (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1982).

[Footnote]
Twenty years is shorthand for one "generation, a metaphoric measure, historical time's counterpart to a "foot." It is the shortest period we will allow for big change. Revisit the feelings of those marveling at the strangeness of the arrived urbanindustrial landscape. Like TS. Eliot, in wonderment over what we had done to ourselves: Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. There, remembering Dante: asi lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta."
(Inferno III, 55-57); and so, also placing the industrial city dose to the geography of Hell. Then there is Beaudelaire's cut on industrial Paris, in his brutal elegy: Swarming city, city full of dreams, Where the specter by daylight accosts the passer-by. Mysteries flow everywhere, like sap,
In the narrow veins of the mighty colossus. From Les Fleur du Mal, translated by Christiane Paul.



Indexing (document details)
Subjects: Information technology, Migration, Technological change, Social change, Politics, Studies, Communications industry
Classification Codes 9190 US, 1200 Social policy, 5240 Software & systems, 9130 Experimental/theoretical treatment, 9550 Public sector organizations
Locations: US
Author(s): Michael Vlahos
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Journal of International Affairs. New York: Spring 1998. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; pg. 497, 29 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN: 0022197X
ProQuest document ID: 29187350
Text Word Count 11398
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.consortiumlibrary.org/pqdweb?did=29187350&sid=5&Fmt=3&clientId=23364&RQT=309&VName=PQD

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