Entering the Infosphere.

• Author: Vlahos, Michael
• Position: Communications network as social and political place

The world is entering an historical period of big change. Big change is complex and chaotic, and almost impossible to view from an objective distance by any of its participants. Big change is defined in this article as migration and revolution combined. Migration is human passage, the move from one place of identity and belonging to another, and it is the central action of big change. Revolution is the ratification of the place that change makes. This is achieved through social political theater, in which a new elite takes on the authority of leadership, and in which elite and all society mark their emergence from the passage of big change. Revolutionary theater is necessary to resolve the complex conflicts unleashed by migration. The theater of great events, with its ultimate focus on the politics of vision and authority, is culture's ritual conveyance, whereby society is moved through a shared, symbolic passage so that it can accept all that has happened.

This article focuses on big change in the United States, knowing that the change will eventually sweep over the world. But the initial change in Americans' lives raises several existential questions:

* How to come out of this migration and still feel a sense of larger community and identity?

* Who among many eager competitors will form the new elite?

* How will authority be transferred, in terms of legitimating a new elite and a new vision of American life?

* What might we imagine as the theater of change, its politics, our future history's great events?

THE INFOSPHERE: BIG CHANGE TODAY

The Infosphere is our vehicle of change--a vehicle we have come to call technology The argument that shifts in technology are intimately intertwined with shifts in human life is commonplace. Not so familiar is the argument, advanced here, that these shifts create a new human place and that society, eventually, migrates to it. Even beyond that is the argument that another such shift is beginning and that migration has already begun to a place called the Infosphere. A place which has almost no material aspect and has not even entered the collective mind--yet.

What is the Infosphere?

The Infosphere is shorthand for the fusion of all the world's communications networks, databases and sources of information into a vast, intertwined and heterogeneous tapestry of electronic interchange. The global fusion of networks changes the character of each individual network. Networks will no longer serve simply as the medium through which people in different places can communicate, enhancing their in situ activities. The global fusion of networks creates a network ecology. A place in which people can gather and do business. People will be able to conduct their activities increasingly in the global network ecology(1)--the Infosphere.

The Infosphere has the potential to gather all people and all knowledge together in one place. This is what makes the Infosphere so compelling. The place itself is not "real," meaning, it is not part of our normal, physical world. Operating in the Infosphere is disconcerting today, but people accept its alien environment because it offers tremendous advantages. It gives people the ability to meet and access information anywhere, all the time. And people can meet in groups, share information and make agreements, just like they do in situ. The difference is that they are not site-bound. Eventually, as the environment becomes more familiar, it will become less alien.

Business transactions and financial exchange are already migrating to the Infosphere, which is rapidly becoming the new global marketplace. People well-equipped to enter the Infosphere today are finding that they can do business while reducing onsite overhead dramatically, happily pruning business travel and exponentially expanding customer geography. Thus economic advantage is driving the evolution of the Infosphere. Capital expansion and competitive awareness means that, in the near future, most enterprises in the developed world will be doing business in the Infosphere. And as the Infosphere becomes essential to enterprise, it will become essential to most people as well. But people will not make the Infosphere a part of their lives simply because it is business. It must be validated in the life of society

Peoples' migration to an alien environment requires a shift in social patterns and spirit. Because the Infosphere is fueled by technology, people are still taught that the Infosphere is a communications network. Then they discover, upon entering, that it is a place for them. Like any human place, architecture does not make a place, people do. The migration of people to the Infosphere depends in part on people seeing it as important to their life and work. But their willing migration also depends on people seeing it as a human place that is comfortable, familiar and social. When people collectively reach this crest of recognition, their migration will bring us to a cultural watershed, and that is when the Infosphere will become central to the life of society

Creating societies through business enterprise will be the decisive factor. Enterprises are taking their wide area network (WANs) and local area networks (LANs) and moving them into the ecology of the Internet. Call this the transubstantiation of the network, from the office to the Infosphere. Once there, these new "intranets" begin to evolve yet again, into "extranets." Interior corporate societies are dynamically reconnecting with themselves and, in turn, with the world, through the relational technology metaphors constantly being created for the world wide web. This means that, from coffee mess to corporate plaza, the new meeting ground of each corporate community will migrate from the office to the intranet/extranet. People will find that they do business more effectively on their intranets, and that they feel closer to their firm and their officemates in the ether. The first real communities begin at this point.

A replacement for the ethos of the industrial era will be validated through social relationships in Infosphere enterprise. This leading-edge effect in cultural adaptation is not new. It was, in fact, integral to how American society adapted to the Industrial Revolution. What happened then, and what should happen now, is that microbehaviors, values and norms, established and ratified in business enterprise, will be melded into a template for the value system of an Infosphere-centered society. But business is the conveyor, not the creator, yet it is a powerfully effective conveyor of values in the American ethos. We should not cavil at the thought of business renewing ethos, because enterprise-established norms in a new environment are not any less valid than norms, values and behaviors established by other institutional sectors in national life. In the American experience, the establishment of norms by business is the path most accepted by Americans. The legitimacy of new social patterns in American life will be grounded in Infosphere enterprise.(2)

The human migration to the Infosphere represents an historical shift on several levels of significance. It is a true transhumance(3)--a movement of human society to a new place, much like the colonizing of the New World, while still connected to the old. It is thus a migration from, as well as toward, the in situ and material patterns of all human relationships to something very different and more complex. This entails a migration from long familiar patterns of culture. Human culture has always adapted to fit new environments, and the change is often as difficult as it is exhilarating, because it involves discarding many cherished and familiar ways of life. However, it is also ultimately comforting, because the high stakes we see in making the change work motivate us to find ways to preserve what is really important.

The Infosphere changes us through a strange, but not alien, blending of technology and culture. We think of technology as something apart from us, as creating discrete artifacts that we put to use. But the Infosphere is not discrete; in fact, it is potentially all-encompassing. Technology's network ecology brings fundamental change to us, but we do the changing. Ultimately, we decide what we want to be in the Infosphere. And the Infosphere is perhaps the most plastic of all human places. Advances in processing, networking and delivering will allow us to extend and enrich the world of the Infosphere at will. But it is important that the Infosphere exists today, however primitive it feels to some. It exists because its network technologies, processing, operating and data systems have matured enough to create a place we can enter. Access is just open enough, connections are robust enough, security is strong enough, viewing is rich enough, navigating is easy enough and its resources even now seem infinite.

"Place" is essential to understanding the change. Big changes in human life, the emergence of big cities early in the Industrial Revolution, are expressed through a new web of social relationships and social meanings that themselves are expressed and understood within the metaphor of a new human place. The new tools build the new place, but what really changes is human society: how we organize ourselves, and human ethos: how we think and behave.(4) So the hypothesis that our new tools, our information technology, are building a new place, the Infosphere, is consistent with the patterns and process of periodic historical shifts in human life, such as the rise of each new form of "civilization," with its "citizen" and "city" In short, our new tools are building a new place and we are moving there. The technologies of the "Information Revolution" are not simply altering our world at the margins by improving how we communicate and share data between old places, but they are creating a new world that is an actual place to which people are migrating.

This is why it...