As one writer observed recently, "if you don't know about the information superhighway, it means you usually wake up and find bats hanging in your cave." One result of all the excitement about the I-way is a growing appetite for a place most people haven't been to and are often hard-pressed to define: "They may not know where it is, but they want desperately to get there. The rush to get online, to avoid being 'left behind' in the information revolution, is intense. Those who find fulfillment in cyberspace often have the religious fervor of the recently converted" (Elmer-DeWitt 6). The race is on to build the information superhighway, and the builders in business, government and other realms talk promisingly about empowering individuals and launching a new age of digital democracy.
Naturally, there are critics who compare it to television and foresee a "vaster wasteland"of 500 channels. The loudest noise, notwithstanding, is that of literally millions of people throughout the globe, some already on the superhighway and some waiting on its on-ramps, who are learning, communicating, doing business, giving and receiving advice, socializing, stealing, praying, and proselytizing to name but a few of its ongoing activities.
A decade ago, the vision of the Net was introduced as "the matrix" in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. He was the first to use the word cyberspace, and he called it "consensual hallucination, " a place where "all the data in the world is stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around." It has since been reinterpreted: "But the real net is not located in hard disks or copper wires; it is a buzzing in our collective synapses- especially the synapses of dreamy, futuristic countercultural types" (Patton 134). The Net, therefore, is the whole information infrastructure today and any number of dreams of what it can be tomorrow.
Cyberspace is a computer-generated landscape that people enter by "jackin...