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The Internet is your time machine that can carry you into the distant past or the far future. Follow along on these pages while I take my own journey to places I've been--or wish I had visited--and to those places that I'd like to visit. Along the way I've included some links you might want to pursue on your own.
In this section, I'm going to explore some of the fascinating vistas of today, as we move toward the next millennium.
Here's a sobering fact to keep in mind while pondering the dizzying pace of the information revolution: Today more than half the people on the planet have yet to place their first telephone call.
The Digital Revolution almost certainly will widen the division of society into the haves and the have-nots. On a global scale, whole regions of the world risk becoming irrelevant to the rarefied global economy that increasingly trades in ideas and information. Colonial Africa was once integral to a global economy that needed its raw materials and labor. Today many African countries find themselves almost completely out of the loop of the global economy and detached from the global telecommunications network.
In the United States, we face the very real danger of becoming a two-tiered society, with one block taking advantage of the technology while the other remains mostly disengaged--a techno-underclass.
This in spite of the fact that the new technologies will almost certainly become so cheap that everyone will be able to afford them.
Think of the television. In 1960, less than 1 percent of all U.S. homes had at least one color television set. Today the figure is 98 percent. You can walk into any apartment in the poorest inner-city neighborhood and find a color TV. And that happened without any government subsidy or private philanthropy. Everyone bought televisions because the prices dropped enough and, for better or worse, they were considered essential to living in our society. Today, we're almost at the point at which a new personal computer will become increasingly essential to our lives.
The real dividing line between the information haves and have-nots in this country will be defined not by cost, but by culture and education. How a child fares in life will be much more dependent on attitude, values and mentality.
The division won't be determined as much by whether a family is rich or poor as by whether a family is engaged in the Digital Age.