Bit City

The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits … This will be a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation, and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliases and agents. Its places will be constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers, and they will be connected by logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways, and streets. How shall we shape it? Who shall be our Hippodamos?

Narrowband/Broadband

The bondage of bandwidth is displacing the tyranny of distance, and a new economy of land use and transportation is emerging – an economy in which high-bandwidth connectivity is an increasingly crucial variable.

Electronic Agoras

The Net … will play as crucial a role in 21st-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians on their Ionian rock.

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.

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.

Challenges for a Webbed Society

The Web fulfills [Vannevar] Bush’s dream of a memex in many respects. While a “universe” of knowledge is still evolving on the Web, the hypertext “trails” on Web pages are associative indexes that people save and share. The Web’s basic structure rests on Bush’s principle of associative indexing, and the flourishing of information on the Web in the last few years demonstrates its potential as a “universe of documents.”

From the Nets

Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of paper-based Advertising Age dismisses the current interest in online communication as “‘cyberspin’ designed to build urgency and credibility for a new technology.”

Welcome to the Emerald City! Please Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

If public participation is to have an effective role in the shaping of the national information infrastructure, it is important to begin now … By the time widespread interaction begins to create social awareness of the consequences these systems will have, it will be too late to act. Democratic participation is needed in the design stage, before technological momentum, sunken costs, and powerful constituencies solidify these networks.