...filtered for meaning...



Today it's hard to talk about what the next year will look like, let alone the next decade. As we experience a cacophony of information coming in from all directions, inquiry ceases and anxiety flavors all our actions. Dimly, we are aware of some change, a fissure separating us from the past that appears more profound than we dare acknowledge. But there's no time to stop and check what that might be. No time. Increasingly, we live in a matrix of information, without context, without pattern, disassociated from the past, rootless and unsettling. Traditional markers are fading fast, and new ones are barely discernible over the event-horizon. Like it or not, we are all now traveling Into the Matrix.

You've just found a beacon.




Electronic Newsletter
meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.

You can get MEME delivered directly by email or read it here. MEME propagates bi-weekly. The current issue is MEME 5.01, Death, Be Not In My Face, an excerpt from Alex Heard's new book Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America. You can also visit the MEME archive, which has issues 1.01 forward. You can search all the issues of MEME for whatever you want as well.

Community Memory
one-to-one is the home for Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace. Wondering what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were doing in 1972, or when e-mail was invented? You might find an answer by searching Community Memory.

Interviews
face-to-face contains raw transcripts of interviews with people like MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte and US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. The theme is technology and social change. Interviews are presented whenever they happen, and previous interviews are kept on file.

Published Articles
dot-T-X-T presents my published thoughts on cyberspace. Here you'll find the full text of articles I wrote for The New York Times, The Economist, Wired, Harper's Bazaar, NetGuide, Marketing Computers, and Lingua Franca.

All About Me
Wondering who I am? My legal name is David Solomon Bennahum. Here you'll find out more about why I write about cyberspace, and the status of my next book, Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace, to be published by Basic Books, in November 1998.

NetGuide           
                                Gold Site



(c) David S. Bennahum. Direct comments, bugs and so on to me at davidsol@panix.com.

Icons designed by Jennifer Pinco.