This book is about the second age of the Internet as it descends from the firmament and becomes embedded in everyday life. A decade ago, the first age of the Internet was a bright light shining above everyday concerns. It was a technological marvel bringing a new Enlightenment to transform the world, just as the printing press fostered the original Enlightenment a halfmillennium ago in Renaissance times (McLuhan 1962). As John Perry Barlow wrote in 1995, a long time ago as Internet trends go, With the development of the Internet, and with the increasing pervasiveness of communication between networked computers, we are in the middle of the.
