The Last Link:Cybernauts in the Electronic Frontier: Pets on a Leash

If wilderness plays an important part in kindling the human spirit, perhaps as it vanishes people are reinventing it in different ways. In the future with the earth encircled by satellites and everyone wired together by digital links, the new back country may become the world of artificial computer networks known as cyberspace. One can already become lost for hours in the neck of the Internet called the World Wide Web, pointing and clicking a trail through a maze of hypertext documents and digital pictures.

The Last Link:Cybernauts in the Electronic Frontier: Pets on a Leash

Virtual communities offer the possibility that we can construct utopian collectivities – communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and skills. Indeed, the prospect of carving new, better virtual communities out of new territories taps into western mythologies of settling frontiers … What the hypemeisters don’t say or don’t realize is that this frontier metaphor deceives us. It conjures up Americana images of the individual lighting out for the territories, independent and hopeful, to make a life. But what is hidden by the metaphor is the cybernaut immersed in virtual worlds, neither self-reliant nor liberated, but utterly dependent for existence on technology created, provided, and sustained by others, living the isolated life of the placeless domesticate.

Strategic Assessment: The Internet

While there is already a great deal of political use of the Internet domestically and internationally, there is likely to be a significant increase in the scale and sophistication of such use in the coming years.

The Last Link:Cybernauts in the Electronic Frontier: Pets on a Leash

That’s the thing about cyberspace. It’s the last frontier and it will be a permanent frontier. It’s infinite and it’s continuously changing.

Strategic Assessment: The Internet

Individuals and organizations without Internet access increasingly risk being left out of important discussions and processes taking place via the Internet.

Challenges for a Webbed Society

Like failed urban planning and architecture schemes, technology developed to transform society often falls flat when given over to people to use. The Web, a technological invention that has spread through voluntary use, perhaps has an advantage over such inventions.

Strategic Assessment: The Internet

It is believed that currently there are approximately 20 million individuals worldwide with access to the Internet. Projections indicate that approximately 100 million will have access by the year 2000.

Challenges for a Webbed Society

If modern civilization obliterates safe public spaces for people to meet and freely interchange ideas, how will our society deal with such spaces formed only online? Will psychological dependence on networked communication create imbalances in offline relationships?

Strategic Assessment: The Internet

When other conventional channels are disrupted, the Internet can be the only available means of communication into and out of the affected areas. Internet messages originating within regions under authoritarian control could provide other useful intelligence. Public messages conveying information about the intent of overseas groups prone to disrupting U.S. military operations can provide important counterintelligence. The Internet could also be used offensively as an additional medium in psychological operations campaigns and to help achieve unconventional warfare objectives.