This analysis of what cyberspace is and what it is not synthesizes the various opinions and perspectives, showing why such divergent views are held on issues such as regulation, censorship and the conduct of business on the Internet and in cyberspace. The book includes current cyberspace law.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
David B. Whittle (b. 1953) is an American author, speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. He has been passionately involved in the personal computer industry since he bought his first personal computer in 1979, and has been going online ever since buying a 300-baud acoustic modem a few months later.
In 1991, he first gained public attention when, as an IBM marketing employee, he posted on an IBM online discussion board a thousand-word critique of IBM's CEO and Chairman that attracted company-wide attention. Someone leaked his comments, and he was thereafter quoted in numerous publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. The Washington Post featured Whittle in a comprehensive article on IBM in its business section.
He not only kept his job throughout the whole affair, while Akers was losing his, but by early 1992, he was tapped by IBM executives to represent IBM online - on CompuServe, Prodigy, bulletin boards, and the Internet. Within weeks of accepting the new position, he had triggered another revolution with the idea that anyone could help IBM market its operating system software, OS/2, in its battle with Windows for desktop supremacy.
His brainchild, Team OS/2, was the first major evidence of the power of far-reaching online networks, as tens of thousands of grass-roots enthusiasts for OS/2 gathered around online discussion groups to get ideas for how to work together to promote OS/2 and prevent Microsoft from gaining monopoly power. Many of their exploits have become the stuff of industry legend.
It wasn't long before Whittle was asked to write books. First, John C. Dvorak invited him to write a book on OS/2 (Dvorak's Guide to OS/2), and then a year later, Jim Seymour invited Dave to lunch to introduce him to a publisher with W.H. Freeman, who suggested that he write a book titled "Cyberspace: The Human Dimension," a book which ended up serving as a text at several universities, including Duke, which invited Whittle to be a guest lecturer some years later. About Cyberspace, Steven R. Covey said "This fascinating book is a powerful illustration of the value of synergy! Where else but cyberspace can millions of individuals from diverse backgrounds communicate in developing and sharing the many new ideas that will profoundly influence the future? This book demonstrates the importance of principle-centered thinking as we forge that future and the technical infrastructure to support it."
Reading the book over a decade after its publication is a fascinating exercise. Whittle dedicated an entire chapter of his book to the social aspects of the Internet, and predicted the rise of social networking and social media like very few other authors of the '90s were able to do. At a time when Internet pornography was difficult to avoid, Whittle's bold call for a clear separation between the public and the private spaces online was a harbinger of the cultural forces that would eventually force the Internet's rampant pornography back behind closed doors.
As a result of Whittle's visionary insights into the ways that online networks were changing and would yet change the world, Working Woman magazine included Whittle in an article quoting "America's most original technological thinkers."
