Whose law will rule in cyberspace? If we use the technology to foster and preserve the immense diversity of the human race instead of molding it to a single Western model, how will we avoid confusion? With a thousand television channels, what will happen to the social glue of shared values and common knowledge? What meaning will standards have, when everybody is his or her own publisher? As knowledge-manufacture by machines speeds beyond our ability to manage it, will we give up trying and retire into cocoons of virtual reality?

The problem with these and similar questions is that they may be the wrong questions. Gutenberg’s detractors worried about the way print would cause disastrous loss of memory. Mainframe makers in the 1950’s were daunted by the thought of an American national market requiring at most five computers. Critics of the telegraph asked, “What would Maine want to say to Texas?” Inevitably we are constrained by our historical context. So we interpret events, trends, and the effects of innovation in the light of what we know to be the facts. Trouble is, a fact today may not be a fact tomorrow.