untangling_the_web

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Conclusion
The overall implications of the Internet for how we work and how we play are just
beginning to be discussed and understood. The Internet is changing, or at the very
least touching, people's lives in ways we have not imagined. I close with an example
of the reach of the web. My 97-year-old aunt in South Carolina had a bit part in an
obscure movie in 1989. Despite the fact that the movie has been largely forgotten,
my aunt has an "Actress Filmography" in the Internet Movie Database. She, of
course, was unaware of her Internet presence and was both thrilled and more than a
little shocked to find that even she was "in cyberspace."
The point, of course, is that no one is out of reach of this powerful, invasive
technology. We change the world with our technology and we, in turn, are altered by
that same technology. It remains to be seen where our technology leads us, whether
into an "endless frontier,,231 or, more ominously, into a "cemetery of dead ideas.,,232
231 Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, Washington, D.C.: United States Government
Printing Office, 1945.
232 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
(November 2005), p. 100.
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