Book R e v i e w s " :':"" City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn by William J. Mitchell MIT Press 1995, 225 pages Reviewed by:Joe Podo/sky Hewlett-Packard,PaloAlto J OE_PODOIL_f KY@HP-PMoAlto-om4.om.hp.com ne of the continuing challenges of the information revo lution of the past few decades is that the important "stuff" of the technology is beyond the capabilities of our human senses. We can't see the bits in our computers or the electrons that represent them. We can write our thoughts and translate those thoughts into software code, but we can only imagine the logic flows, branches, and data movements that occur as that code is converted to electrons and executed. We send all these electrons into networks, where the electrons that represent the code are chunked into packets, disassembled and assembled, causing our thoughts to visit places and follow routes that our physical bodies could never go. We call this imaginary world "virtual," as though the label makes it real. We create analogs to what our senses can deal with. We talk about files and architectures and highways, pages and webs, all of which we sort of understand in the real world, thus giving
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City of bits: space, place and the infobahn
Podolsky, Joe
Follow ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society
, Volume 26 (3)
Association for Computing Machinery – Sep 1, 1996
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