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10 Trends L. Libr. Mgmt. & Tech. 1 (1999)

handle is hein.journals/ttllmt10 and id is 1 raw text is: April 1999 VuL-10 No. 1 IN LAW LIBRARY MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY Edited by Mark E. Estes . For academic, firm, corporate, and government law librarians Life After Cyberspace By PHIL AGRE, University of California, Los Angeles, CA S the Internet matures and becomes integrated th the institutional world around it, it is coming increasingly clear that science fiction has disserved us. Although networked com- puting already had been familiar to many academic and military people for several years, it was taken up by popular culture in the context of the virtual reality craze whose canonical text was Gibson's Neuromancer. Compelling though Neuromancer was as myth, as a forecast it was quite backward. Gibson famously defined cyberspace as a space apart from the corporeal world-a hallucination. But the Internet is not growing apart from the world, but to the contrary is increasingly embedded in it. Forecasting is a hazardous occupation, and among its many hazards is the mistake of overgen- eralizing from transient aspects of one's current-day reality. One prominent reality of computer use in the 1980s was the cumbersome nature of interfaces. The paradigm of computer use then, as for most people still, was the box: the desktop terminal, attached by wires to a processor, with a display screen and keyboard that were useless unless the user's body was immobilized in a narrow range of postures. The desire to cast off these chains is @ 1999 Phil Agre I widespread, and Gibson spoke for many in imagin- ing that the constraints of the box could be cast off by plugging the dam thing directly into one's brain. Computer science, though, is headed in an entirely different direction. The great fashion in user interface research is to get out of the box, as they say, and to embed computers in the physical envi- ronment: in clothing, architecture, automobiles, and public places, letting the devices talk to one another wirelessly. Computing is to become ubiquitous and invisible, industrial design is to merge with system design, and indeed the very concept of computing is to give way to concepts such as writing reports, driv- ing to work, and keeping in touch with one's family. Computing, in short, is increasingly about the activi- ties and relationships of real life, and the boundary between the real world and the world of computer- mediated services is steadily blurring away. The early visions of cyberspace have disserved us in other ways. Certain aspects of Internet archi- tecture and administration are decentralized, and this led to hopes that everything else would become decentralized as well. Information connot- ed freedom, and networks connoted Adam Smith's market of artisans. Economics, however, has taught us that each of these associations is misleading. Information as an industrial input and output continued on page 2 April 1999 1

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