In the end, the Sane Network is not going to emerge from some committee, but from all of us, by tossing up idea after idea and recognizing that 99 percent of them will be garbage, like so many youÕve heard this afternoon.
As bandwidth burgeons and computing muscle continues to grow, cyberspace places will present themselves in increasingly multisensory and engaging ways. They will look, sound, and feel more realistic, they will enable richer self-representations of their users, they will respond to user actions in real time and in complex ways, and they will be increasingly elaborate and artfully designed. We will not just look at them; we will feel present in them. We can expect them to evolve into the elements of cyberspace construction – constituents of a new architecture without tectonics and a new urbanism freed from the constraints of physical space.
Rooms and buildings will henceforth be seen as sites where bits meet the body – where digital information is translated into visual, auditory, tactile, or otherwise perceptible form, and, conversely, where bodily actions are sensed and converted into digital information. Building these programmable places is not just a matter of putting wires in the walls and electronic boxes in rooms (though that is a start). As the relevant technologies continue to develop, miniaturized, distributed computational devices will disappear into the woodwork. Keyboards and mouse pads will cease to be the only bit-collection zones; sensors will be everywhere. Displays and effectors will multiply. In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings.
When telecommunication through lickety-split bits on the infobahn supplements or replaces movement of bodies … and when telepresence substitutes for face-to-face contact … the spatial linkages that we have come to expect are loosened … Urban compositions can begin to float free from one another, and they can potentially relocate and recombine according to new logics. Perhaps it is not too romantic to imagine that unique natural environments, culturally resonant urban settings, and local communities that hold special social meaning will increasingly reassert their power … Increasingly, [buildings] must function as network interfaces – loading docks for bits. They must be equipped with electronic sensors and effectors, onboard processing power, sophisticated internal telecommunications capabilities, software, and capacity for getting bits on and off.
Shall we allow home-based employment, education, entertainment, and other opportunities and services to be channeled to some households and not to others, thereby technologically creating and maintaining a new kind of privilege? Or can we use the infobahn as an equalization mechanism – a device for providing enhanced access to these benefits for the geographically isolated, the homebound elderly, the sick and disabled, and those who cannot afford wheels? … Going out, going to work, going to school or to church, going away to college, and going home are economically significant, socially and legally defining, symbolically freighted acts. To change or eliminate them, as electrocottages and cybercondos promise to do, is to alter the basic fabric of our lives.
Instabilities and ambiguities in space use … challenge traditional ways of representing social distinctions and stages of socialization … Categories lose their clarity, and rites of passage require redefinition, when the uses of built space are no longer permanently assigned and depend from minute to minute on software and the fleeting flow of bits.
Many of our everyday tasks and pastimes will cease to attach themselves to particular spots and slots set aside for their performance – workplaces and working hours, theaters and performance times, home and your own time – and will henceforth be multiplexed and overlaid; we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place, so we will end up using that same place in many different ways. It will no longer be straightforward to distinguish between work time and “free” time or between the space of production and the space of consumption. Ambiguous and contested zones will surely emerge.
Increasingly, homes will be places with network addresses as well as street addresses. The functions of the various interior spaces will be established, in large part, through installation of specialized information spigots and collectors. And, as networks and information appliances deliver expanding ranges of services, there will be fewer occasions to go out.
Not only may vehicles sense where they are in the road system, but the road system may also be equipped with electronic sensors enabling it to detect where the vehicles are. So the old ideas of the tollbooth and the on-ramp meter can be updated; charges for the use of a road can, in principle, be adjusted instantaneously according to the level of road congestion. The task of the smart vehicle then becomes not just one of calculating the shortest or quickest path to a specified destination, but of computing the cheapest path or of finding a reasonably quick route that does not cost too much.In the future, travel through cities will involve continuous information exchange between smart vehicles and smart roadway systems.
The costs of reaching and aggregating audiences should diminish sharply. There will be opportunities to produce and distribute low-budget entertainment for very small audiences and to identify and reach scattered audiences with the most specialized of interests and tastes. The infobahn may become a vast, global Broadway lined with thousands of virtual theaters. So the social superglue of necessary proximity between performers and audience is losing its old stickiness, and the traditional architectural types and social conventions (going to the theater, cheering for your local team in the ballpark) that we associate with performance are coming unstuck … Established distinctions between producers and consumers of entertainment … are breaking down. Soon, all the world will be an electronic stage.