Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1992 16:50:09 EDT
From: jpl3 (Joe Lucia)
Subject: Re: Gravity Twenty
To: tf01 (TIMOTHY FALCONER)

I suggest you read Michael Schrage's _Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration_. A lot of what you're groping toward here may be described in broad outline in that book.

You are right about buidling "ideals" into technology, although I'm not
very optimistic about that as a large-scale project, given that it's
markets that drive innovation in a commodity culture. What we need is a mechanism to rescue our public/political/social discourse from
commodification. That's one promise of the new digital communications technologies. But where anarchy and possibility now reign, darker forces of monopoly and economic control are likely to hold sway before long. That's my picture of it--the dystopian possibilities are greater by far than the utopian ones.

Joe Lucia