One of the changes in our world that characterizes the late twentieth century is the digital transformation of an astonishingly wide range of material artifacts interwoven with social practices. In one location after another, people are saying in effect: Let us take what exists now and restructure or replace it in digital format. Let's take the bank teller, the person sitting behind the counter with little scraps of paper and an adding machine and replace it with an ATM accessible 24 hours a day. Let's take analog recording and the vinyl LP and replace it with the compact disc in which music is encoded as a stream of digital bits. Or let's take the classroom with the teacher, blackboard, books, and verbal interchange and replace it with materials presented in computer hardware and software and call it "interactive learning".
In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means that many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression. As new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surrounds them are often much different from what existed previously. This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully comprehends.
As they ponder astonishing transformations associated with the new electronics, thoughtful people need to ask: What kinds of personal practices, social relations, legal and political norms, and lasting institutions will emerge from this upheaval? More importantly, what kinds of practices, relations, rules, and institutions do we want to emerge in these settings.
