In the 1990s the personal computer revolution turned into the social computer revolution. The thrill of having sophisticated computer power on your desktop turned out to be just the beginning, once your machine could connect to everyone else's via telephone lines. There is a global computer the size of humanity taking shape. Now that everybody can publish their own interests to a world audience on the Net, we learn irreversibly that the world is far …showed first 75 words of 390 total…

…showed last 75 words of 390 total…noticed that suddenly the ground was covered with earthworms." Some have described most activity on the Net as merely "vanity publishing" or "advertising." Those are left-over broadcast terms whose meaning is changed in the Net environment. Grass-roots "advertising" is what assembles new communities of interest and whole new ecologies of knowledge. If we had any idea how wildly interesting "vanity publishing" could be when it is cheap and plentiful, we would never have condemned it.