Cyberspace 2000 : Dealing with Information Overload Hal

F rancis Bacon is reported to have said that the three things that made his world different from that of the ancient Greeks and Romans were the printing press, the compass and gunpowder. It is instructive to note he didn’t mention the water pump, the rigid horse collar, or lateen sails—all of which were critical to the advancement of agriculture and commerce. One suspects Bacon was not interested in great technological tours de force per se, but in those technological advances that also stretched, or even tore, our social fabric and which irreversibly changed the way we looked at the world and each other. It was not enough to change the way we lived. To make Bacon’s short list, a technology had to change the way we looked at life. Even the abilities to irrigate land and make it fertile, and navigate a ship into the wind as well as away from it, did not qualify. Bacon was looking for things as important to the 16th century as systems of writing were for the ancient peoples and stone tools and controlled fire were for the pre-historic. We are in the midst of a technological revolution that will dramatically set our century apart from Bacon’s—the digital networks and cyberspace. Together with perhaps fossil-fueled transportation, electricity, and television, cyberspace seems to most satisfy Bacon’s requirement that a truly differentiating technology have far-reaching consequences for society. Of these four technologies, cyberspace is the only one that will come to be associated with the 21st century. This installment of “Digital Village” is the first of several columns that will look at the future of cyberspace in the next decade—cyberspace in 2000. We’ll attempt to foresee some of the important social issues, predict technological trends, and investigate promising, new, emerging technologies. We’ll even offer some modest speculation, more than idly if not with perfect insight. We begin with the challenge of information overload on cyberspace.