Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
became one of the principal advocates of supply-side economics,
and was much quoted by President Reagan. More recently he has
concerned himself with the possibilities of high technology. In his
newsletter, the
Gilder Technology Report
he advises corporations
about technological developments, while, in a series of topics
including
Microcosm
,
37
Life after Television
38
and
Telecosm
,
39
he has
breathlessly proclaimed a future dominated and determined by
electronic technologies. Telecosm predicts the end of the computer
and the beginnings of a world dominated by wireless, broadband
and network technology, with far reaching social consequences.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, has written a
manifesto entitled
Being Digital
,
40
which looks to a brave new digital
world where atoms are replaced by bits, or in other words, many of
the clumsy material means of communication and representation
we presently use, such as topics, television videos or celluloid films,
will be superseded by far more efficient and lightweight digital
means. Kevin Kelly, erstwhile editor of
Wired
, has made a name for
writing populist topics aiming to express the technological zeitgeist,
particularly inasmuch as it seems to confirm his own technological
utopian and determinist neo-liberal agenda. Pre-eminent among
these works is
Out of Control
,
41
in which Kelly conflates the oper-
ations of global capitalism, neo-liberal economic theory, experi-
ments in computer-simulated 'life', the sciences of complexity and
chaos, the World Wide Web and other phenomena to proclaim the
advent of an 'out of control' neo-biological world.
the world wide web
The development and reception of these ideas owed much to the
increasing importance of the Internet and the emergence of the
Wo r l d Wi d e We b . I n t h e l a t e
s the Internet was beginning to
emerge out of the loose conglomeration of networks that had
developed around ARPANET since its founding in the late
1970
1960
s.
