Links to the Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution
Our age is a time of revolution. We are passing between worlds.
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The old industrial order is giving way to a new dispensation, and the global Internet is its hallmark, what one thinker has called "the definitive force" of the new era.
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Follow the links below to resources which explore and debate the future into which humankind is rushing.
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The links.

George Gilder's
Telecosm One of the most definitive and important books on the global technology shift, George Gilder's Telecosm, a work-in-progress since 1992, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. In Gilder's words:
Today, communications technologies are unleashing the Internet as the definitive force of a new industrial era, rendering the CPU peripheral and the net central. This 'paradigm shift' is fundamental to comprehending the advent of the Telecosm. . . The microcosmic paradigm is giving way to the telecosmic paradigm; the law of the microcosm is giving up its supremacy to the law of the telecosm. . .
Forbes Magazine's ASAP Archive of George Gilder's Telecosm articles.

The Third Wave Alvin and Heidi Toffler's influential 1980 work, The Third Wave, which declared the advent of "a revolutionary upheaval on a par with, or even greater than, the industrial revolution--or indeed the agrarian revolution that came first." The second book in a trilogy which began with Future Shock, it was followed by Powershift, which posits a transition to a new world system in which "knowledge about knowledge" will become the source of economic and political power.
1994 MicroTimes interview of Alvin Toffler, "Surfing the Third Wave."
"Future Shock In the Present Tense," the keynote address by Toffler at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's 1996 Aspen Summit.

Behind the Wave: Consequences of the Digital Age Read the San Jose Mercury News series on the technological revolution:
Something happened by the time 1996 came to a close.
There was no defining moment, in the way that signature events can often mark the boundary of an era.
Still, a divide was crossed. The latest wave of the technology revolution passed through, and the sea began to draw back and swell in preparation for passage of the next . . .

History of the Internet The Discovery Channel has created an excellent timeline presenting the History of the Internet with numerous links to Web sites devoted to major developments.
Other useful Internet history sites:
The Internet Society's A Brief History of the Internet
Ronda and Michael Hauben's The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net
Hobbes' Internet Timeline
Vinton Cerf's A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks

Hypertext, Cybernetics, Cyborgs, and Virtual Realities The University of Iowa Libraries Gateway to the Internet site offers a first-rate, comprehensive jump page devoted to Internet resources on many areas of cyber-philosophy.
A bit heavy on post-modern analysis (but, alas, what scholarly field is immune?).

Cyberculture Studies The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies at the University of Maryland is "an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, study, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. Collaborative in nature, RCCS seeks to establish and support ongoing conversations about the emerging field . . ."

Arthur C. Clarke One of the first of the modern scientific futurists, Arthur C. Clarke has been praised as consistently more accurate in his prophecies than many.

Clarke's Laws
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Some Clarke resources:
Clarke speaks about the future (Realaudioplug-in required)
"Live" UIUC Cybercast of Clarke From His Home in Sri Lanka
Wired's interview, "Arthur C. Clarke On Life (and Death)"
The "Arthur C. Clarke" chapter of The Silicon Jungle, by David H. Rothman
1997 Interview with Clarke marking the fictional birthday of HAL the Computer
N.Y. Times Book Reviewprofile of Clarke(U.S. users--obtain free password)

Futurism and Futurists "In the act of searching out the road into the future, man crosses the frontiers of the unknown and raises Homo Sapiens to a new level: the level of foresight and purposefulness . . . In taking thought for tomorrow, man begins to create tomorrow."
--Fred Polak
The World Future Society
The Futurist Resource Page
Papers of the Millenium Institute

Society, Cyberspace and the Future Article by Bruce Murray of Caltech which argues that:
New interactive electronic communications during the early decades of the 21st Century will strongly impact individuals and groups , perhaps as profoundly as broadcast radio and video shaped the 20th Century. . . Stable, harmonious communities will be essential for dispersed leadership at all scales as traditional command-type political and of economic structures diminish in significance. New interactive communications technology can --and must-- play an essential role in connecting individuals within diverse, dispersed communities.

Time Magazine's Welcome to Cyberspace The spring 1995 Time special issue devoted to the cyber-revolution.

The Software Revolution Business Week article (12-4-95) on the ongoing upheaval amounting to "a basic shift in the software business no less seismic than the fall of the Berlin Wall."

As We May Think Vannevar Bush's landmark article published in the July, 1945 Atlantic Monthly, credited with coining the term hypertext, which states:
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual. . . The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it . . .
Proceedings of a fiftieth-aniversary 1995 conference at MIT on the lasting impact of Bush's work.

The World-Wide Web History Project A comprehensive attempt to record and preserve the definitive history of the creation and growth of the Web:
To date the Project has used two primary research methods: personal recollections, either taken down in interviews or recorded on their own time by sources, and archival research. . .

The Virtual Institute of Information The Virtual Institute of Information is a growing archive at Columbia University for telecommunications, cybercommunications, and mass media research.
A list of available papers at the site.
While there, see these excellent articles:
Jeffrey Hart and Sangbae Kim's, "Power in the Information Age
Eli Noam's, "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University"

Parody Jeff Duntemann's "The Love Song of J. Random Hacker"

Grammatron The most ambitious hypertext project ever attempted, Grammatron is a huge cyber-novel, a "public domain narrative environment" developed by virtual artist Mark Amerika in conjunction with the Brown University Graduate Creative Writing Program and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graphics and Visualization Center:
The project consists of over 1000 text spaces, 1700 links, an original soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, unique hyperlink structures by way of specially-coded Javascripts, animated and still life images, and more storyworld development than any other narrative created exclusively for the Web. Future versions will integrate state-of-the-art Virtual Reality languages for a more immersive, collaborative experience...
The author's description of what he terms "hypertextual consciousness":
The cyborg-narrator, whose language investigations will create fluid narrative worlds for other cyborg-narrators to immerse themselves in, no longer has to feel bound by the self-contained artifact of book media. instead of being held hostage by the page metaphor and its self-limiting texture as a landscape with distinct borders, hypertextual consciousness can now instantaneously link itself with a multitude of discourse networks where various lines of flight circulate and mediate the continued development of the collective-self as it rids us of this need to surrender our thinking to outmoded conceptions of rhetoric and authorship. . .
See the review of Grammatron in Wired (6-27-97).

Nicholas Negroponte:
Being Digital He has been called "an info-prophet; revered by cyberpunks and the darling of a largely unquestioning media. He makes bold predictions about the digital revolution and brooks no criticism. He's confident and audacious, and if challenged, is fond of saying: 'If I'm wrong, wait 10 minutes.'" He is Nicholas Negroponte, a founder and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory.
Negroponte might be termed a utopian futurist. He predicts a bright future for a human race riding the cresting wave of digital technology. However, he is not blind to the disruptions and dislocations of the transition to the Digital Age. In the epilogue to his book Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), he writes:
I am optimistic by nature. However, every technology or gift of science has a dark side. Being digital is no exception. The next decade will see cases of intellectual-property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. The notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear.
Nonetheless, the book concludes on a strong note of optimism about the future:
Bits are not edible; in that sense they cannot stop hunger. Computers are not moral; they cannot resolve complex issues like the rights to life and to death. But being digital, nevertheless, does give much cause for optimism. Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.
Read extended excerpts from Being Digital.
A collection of Negroponte's monthly Wired magazine columns.
Finally, a skeptical profile of Negroponte in 21C Magazine.

Maintained by Frederic Giacobazzi. Send suggested additions.

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	George Gilder's Telecosm	One of the most definitive and important books on the global technology shift, George Gilder's Telecosm, a work-in-progress since 1992, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. In Gilder's words: Today, communications technologies are unleashing the Internet as the definitive force of a new industrial era, rendering the CPU peripheral and the net central. This 'paradigm shift' is fundamental to comprehending the advent of the Telecosm. . . The microcosmic paradigm is giving way to the telecosmic paradigm; the law of the microcosm is giving up its supremacy to the law of the telecosm. . . Forbes Magazine's ASAP Archive of George Gilder's Telecosm articles.

	*The Third Wave*	Alvin and Heidi Toffler's influential 1980 work, The Third Wave, which declared the advent of "a revolutionary upheaval on a par with, or even greater than, the industrial revolution--or indeed the agrarian revolution that came first." The second book in a trilogy which began with Future Shock, it was followed by *Powershift, which posits a transition to a new world system in which "knowledge about knowledge" will become the source of economic and political power. 1994 MicroTimes* interview of Alvin Toffler, "Surfing the Third Wave." "Future Shock In the Present Tense," the keynote address by Toffler at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's 1996 Aspen Summit.

	*Behind the Wave: Consequences of the Digital Age*	Read the San Jose Mercury News series on the technological revolution: Something happened by the time 1996 came to a close. There was no defining moment, in the way that signature events can often mark the boundary of an era. Still, a divide was crossed. The latest wave of the technology revolution passed through, and the sea began to draw back and swell in preparation for passage of the next . . .


	History of the Internet	The Discovery Channel has created an excellent timeline presenting the *History of the Internet* with numerous links to Web sites devoted to major developments. Other useful Internet history sites: The Internet Society's A Brief History of the Internet Ronda and Michael Hauben's The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net *Hobbes' Internet Timeline* Vinton Cerf's *A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks*

	*Hypertext, Cybernetics, Cyborgs, and Virtual Realities*	The University of Iowa Libraries Gateway to the Internet site offers a first-rate, comprehensive jump page devoted to Internet resources on many areas of cyber-philosophy. A bit heavy on post-modern analysis (but, alas, what scholarly field is immune?).

	Cyberculture Studies	The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies at the University of Maryland is "an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, study, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. Collaborative in nature, RCCS seeks to establish and support ongoing conversations about the emerging field . . ."

	Arthur C. Clarke	One of the first of the modern scientific futurists, Arthur C. Clarke has been praised as consistently more accurate in his prophecies than many. Clarke's Laws 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Some Clarke resources: Clarke speaks about the future (Realaudioplug-in required) "Live" UIUC Cybercast of Clarke From His Home in Sri Lanka Wired's interview, "Arthur C. Clarke On Life (and Death)" *The "Arthur C. Clarke" chapter of The Silicon Jungle, by David H. Rothman* 1997 Interview with Clarke marking the fictional birthday of HAL the Computer N.Y. Times Book Reviewprofile of Clarke(U.S. users--obtain free password)

	Futurism and Futurists	"In the act of searching out the road into the future, man crosses the frontiers of the unknown and raises Homo Sapiens to a new level: the level of foresight and purposefulness . . . In taking thought for tomorrow, man begins to create tomorrow." --Fred Polak The World Future Society The Futurist Resource Page Papers of the Millenium Institute

	Society, Cyberspace and the Future	Article by Bruce Murray of Caltech which argues that: New interactive electronic communications during the early decades of the 21st Century will strongly impact individuals and groups , perhaps as profoundly as broadcast radio and video shaped the 20th Century. . . Stable, harmonious communities will be essential for dispersed leadership at all scales as traditional command-type political and of economic structures diminish in significance. New interactive communications technology can --and must-- play an essential role in connecting individuals within diverse, dispersed communities.

	**Time Magazine's Welcome to Cyberspace**	*The spring 1995 Time* special issue** devoted to the cyber-revolution.

	*The Software Revolution*	Business Week article (12-4-95) on the ongoing upheaval amounting to "a basic shift in the software business no less seismic than the fall of the Berlin Wall."

	*As We May Think*	Vannevar Bush's landmark article published in the July, 1945 Atlantic Monthly, credited with coining the term hypertext, which states: Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual. . . The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it . . . Proceedings of a fiftieth-aniversary 1995 conference at MIT on the lasting impact of Bush's work.

	The World-Wide Web History Project	A comprehensive attempt to record and preserve the definitive history of the creation and growth of the Web: To date the Project has used two primary research methods: personal recollections, either taken down in interviews or recorded on their own time by sources, and archival research. . .

	The Virtual Institute of Information	The Virtual Institute of Information is a growing archive at Columbia University for telecommunications, cybercommunications, and mass media research. A list of available papers at the site. While there, see these excellent articles: Jeffrey Hart and Sangbae Kim's, "Power in the Information Age Eli Noam's, "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University"

	Parody	Jeff Duntemann's "The Love Song of J. Random Hacker"

	Grammatron	The most ambitious hypertext project ever attempted, *Grammatron* is a huge cyber-novel, a "public domain narrative environment" developed by virtual artist Mark Amerika in conjunction with the Brown University Graduate Creative Writing Program and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graphics and Visualization Center: The project consists of over 1000 text spaces, 1700 links, an original soundtrack delivered via Real Audio 3.0, unique hyperlink structures by way of specially-coded Javascripts, animated and still life images, and more storyworld development than any other narrative created exclusively for the Web. Future versions will integrate state-of-the-art Virtual Reality languages for a more immersive, collaborative experience... The author's description of what he terms "hypertextual consciousness": The cyborg-narrator, whose language investigations will create fluid narrative worlds for other cyborg-narrators to immerse themselves in, no longer has to feel bound by the self-contained artifact of book media. instead of being held hostage by the page metaphor and its self-limiting texture as a landscape with distinct borders, hypertextual consciousness can now instantaneously link itself with a multitude of discourse networks where various lines of flight circulate and mediate the continued development of the collective-self as it rids us of this need to surrender our thinking to outmoded conceptions of rhetoric and authorship. . . See the review of Grammatron in Wired (6-27-97).

	Nicholas Negroponte: Being Digital	He has been called "an info-prophet; revered by cyberpunks and the darling of a largely unquestioning media. He makes bold predictions about the digital revolution and brooks no criticism. He's confident and audacious, and if challenged, is fond of saying: 'If I'm wrong, wait 10 minutes.'" He is Nicholas Negroponte, a founder and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory. Negroponte might be termed a utopian futurist. He predicts a bright future for a human race riding the cresting wave of digital technology. However, he is not blind to the disruptions and dislocations of the transition to the Digital Age. In the epilogue to his book Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), he writes: I am optimistic by nature. However, every technology or gift of science has a dark side. Being digital is no exception. The next decade will see cases of intellectual-property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. The notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear. Nonetheless, the book concludes on a strong note of optimism about the future: Bits are not edible; in that sense they cannot stop hunger. Computers are not moral; they cannot resolve complex issues like the rights to life and to death. But being digital, nevertheless, does give much cause for optimism. Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. Read extended excerpts from *Being Digital. A collection of Negroponte's monthly Wired* magazine columns. Finally, a skeptical profile of Negroponte in 21C Magazine.