Writing this section of my book on the web makes me think about my own use of it. What did I do on it today? Partly it depends I guess what you call the "web": at one time it meant the world wide web which was just one service on the Net, the easy one. Today it seems to mean the whole thing. And the web isnt just a service it absorbs and transforms most of the old communication technologies: telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing, and adds some new ones: audio downloading, linking, info-tracking (or whatever its capacity to record and publish usage immediately is called). To use the old Hegelian lingo: it sublates the old media.

Me on the web today: check my email first thing after breakfast and then once every couple of hours or so till now before going to bed; order some books (a nice fat check has come in) and fiddle with my want lists on Amazon and ABE; open up at&t news site a couple of times during the day to make sure no big disaster has hit the world while I was doing something else; go on to Limewire and try mainly unsuccessfully to download some Son Volt tracks, because I came across a reference to them somewhere or other (I think reading the paper this morning) which seemed intriguing; randomly checking out some blogs and bookmark one's I might one look at again (Lessig's Blog looks definitely promising) and then just before the day comes to end spend some time on Apple Music downloading 30 second samples of a bunch of pop albums, following the trail of "people who bought this also bought this' leads....

If this is at all typical of net usage, what might it mean? More time available for consumption; things that one used to do out there in the world (mainly in shops) you now can do at home; more cultural fragmentation which means more choices (Lisa is watching tv, I am reading and then webbing). Not much else? Certainly no victory of dematerialisation or virtuality, those catchcries of technoculture theory. The whole 'virtual' thing was a red herring. And if everyone moves onto the Web like this the social effects will likely be profound: less culture in public more cultural consumption in domestic space (withdrawing some of the movement between neighbourhoods that came in with the car); the emergence of new domain between the public and the private—the domain of this blog, which is not just for me but not really for anyone else either, its neither secret nor public, its not signed but not quite anonymous. Lost in the vastness of the web's chatter, and enabled by that.
But of course no one knows where the web is going, what it will deliver. So predictions are all the more tempting and all the more useless. One day it will just form the armature of the culture and society we have: like electricity or the car or the telephone, whose impacts were probably no less profound (what does it mean to say that?)