Guilty

Digital media could make it possible for people to interact – maybe even changing each other’s minds in the process – something traditional media inhibit throught their addicition to objectivity, spokespeople, and sensationalism … Online news suggests a forum in which it would be easier for fragmented political or racial groups to begin … teaching members of [many] tribes how to communicate and providing them with the simple means of doing so … If one tenet of our age is that information wants to be free, its companion is that media want to tell the truth. Neither information nor media get what they want much of the time; this is one of the great ironies of the information revolution and the sad legacy of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Interview with Douglas Engelbart

The perception people have of the future, of what its potential is, of what there is to do about it etcetera, is the biggest single problem in mankind’s ability in the future to harness technology and really take advantage of it … The large parts of our world … are being taken for granted and they’re not being examined ever or being considered as candidates for change, for explicit planned change. And yet the rapidity with which really dramatic-scale changes are occurring in what the capabilities of technology are, are such that by the time that really gets integrated into the whole, our whole social human system, there’s a lot of adaptation to be made.

Cold Knowledge and Social Warmth

Every new communication technology – including the telephone – brings people together in new ways and distances them in others. If we are to make good decisions as a society about a powerful new communition medium, we must not fail to look at the human element.

Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny

As we move into the world of mobile code, of secure systems, of network payment, the new principles are being, silently or not, laid down. These principles will define the behavior of a new machine, a new anthill, a new brain, which is the sum of ourselves and our creations. Vannevar Bush’s MEMEX was described as a complex machine. We see it now as a cog in a larger system. We feel fairly proud that we have built MEMEX-like machines. But now we have links, do we know what to do with them? When it comes to designing larger machine, we are still banging the rocks together. But we are at a time of great creativity, of great potential for change for better or worse, and there is a feeling that in fact we may be able to bring our collective teamwork up to a level at which we can ensure our survival.

Chapter One – Introduction

We will all become mighty morphing cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute … Think of yourself on some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable, fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of bits, and you have software in your underwear.

Physics for Phantoms

In the real world, people with just and unjust causes can place themselves in public spaces so as to be seen and heard whether we want to or not. They cannot be “screened out,” by law. If cyberspace is to have any purely public domains, then, provision (ii) of The Principle of Personal Visibility must be suspended there. And by law.

Physics for Phantoms

A world populated only by lurkers would be as empty as a ghost town, like a neutron-bombed Vegas with lights blazing and no visitors…but worse: the night air would have eyes … A virtual world consisting of living representations of real people and with a bare minimum of architecture would fare better than a virtual world in which the reverse was the case.

Physics for Phantoms

Creators of cyberspaces have control over the direction of virtual gravity, and there are interactions to be considered between this direction and the direction of real gravity (after all, the traveller’s body is still here, in a chair) especially when major virtual body movement is involved such as flight, shrinkage, rotation, and braking. Indeed, the larger problem of motion sickness, which is the conflict between optical and inner-ear motion-information to the brain, might never be fully solved.

Physics for Phantoms

As today’s cyberspaces – the space of the telephone, e-mail, MUDs, video-conferences, interactive TV and on-line data services – coalesce with today’s arcade – and museum-grade virtual worlds, logics will emerge that are informed by the reality coded into our bodies: the topo-logic, that is, of 4 million years of natural evolution as well as the mytho-logic of 100,000 years of human cultural evolution, layered upon the topo-logic and constrained by it.