Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities

Chapter 4. America’s Love Affair with the Internet

	Americans have definitely crossed into a new era of economic and social experience bound up in digitally-based technological changes that are producing new ways of working, new means and manners of communicating, new goods and services, and new forms of community.
	--ROBERT J. SHAPIRO

Howard Rheingold homesteaded on the Internet as early as the 1970s, and in the pages ahead we will read his account of those early days. Users in the 1970s were a mixed lot of government employees, defense contractors, and members of the university community, such as students and professors. Rheingold needed to understand how telecommunications and computing worked to use what came to be known as the Internet. He ...