Stefik's basic premise is simple: the way we think about the Internet -- the mental symbols we use to represent its nature and purpose -- will determine what the Internet will become. He's gathered the writings of some of the most insightful and creative writers dealing with our growing global infrastructure to examine the ways we consider the Net and what that means for our future. The essays are as readable as they are thought-provoking, and Stefik's surrounding commentaries bind the diverse works into a whole. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The "information superhighway" is a metaphor oft used to describe the internet, used so often that Stefik fears we're in danger of subjecting the evolution of the net to the limiting implications of this metaphor. Stefik, along with a host of prescient techno thinkers and doers, examine four richer, more powerful metaphors and their Jungian archetypes that together should expand anyone's thinking about the cyber world... And those metaphors are: digital library (The Keeper of Knowledge), electronic mail (Communicator), electronic marketplace (Trader), and digital world (Adventurer). The summoning of the archetypes in service of Stefik's argument is less silicon psychobabble than it is a compelling way to organize this book around the very real ways in which the net is being used.
CONTRIBUTORS
The I-Way as Publishing and Community Memory
Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Robert E. Kahn, Joshua Lederberg, John Browning, Scott D. N. Cook, Vicky Reich, Mark Weiser, Ranjit Makkuni
The I-Way as a Communications Medium
Lee Sproull, Samer Faraj, Jay Machado, Lynn Conway, Joshua Lederberg.
Selling Goods and Services the I-Way
Thomas Malone, Joanne Yates, Robert Benjamin, Laura Fillmore, Mark Stefik
The I-Way as a Gateway to Experience
Pavel Curtis, Julian Dibbell, Harry Collins, Mark Stefik, John Seeley Brown, William Wulf, Barbara Viglizzo
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