This is an amazing moment. The world is speeding up, communication is increasing, a democratic revolution is happening right before our eyes.
I was reading an article by John Perry Barlow the other day in Wired talking about all of the amazing benefits this revolution will bring us. One idea really caught my fancy:
“It provides access to all the world's written knowledge with a few keystrokes. Net.Plus: Thanks to Net-roaming ‘agents,’ burgeoning ftp archives, and vast commercial databases, it is now possible to retrieve any material that can be stored electronically.”
That promise is amazing. For an historian to have ready access to the whole of human knowledge? It’s tantalizing. I can imagine searching every archive on the planet with just a couple simple commands. Databases upon databases of every letter, diary entry, newspaper in the country suddenly feels possible?
Barlow of course includes some Net.Minus points too: “It might take quite a few keystrokes. The interfaces are savage. Keyword searches give you too little or way too much. Cyberspace is an infinite bramble of white noise.”
We’ll need to remain vigilant as we build this new landscape - make as much accessible as we can with as few barriers as possible. We need to keep this a free and open place for everyone.
Last Updated: November 12, 1993
This site is best viewed using the NCSA Mosaic WWW browser.