There can be no doubting that advanced information technologies will bring large-scale social change. The technology is advancing at an extraordinary rate in quantitative terms, and it will probably continue to improve by a factor of 100 each decade.

Sheer computing power and communications bandwidth will be abundant. The hard question is what direction the consequent social changes will take.

The technology is not only increasingly powerful but highly malleable. Its qualitative architecture is capable of evolving in many different directions, depending on who can assemble the resources to build it and secure the cooperation of others to use it. And that is a political and economic question, as much as it is technical.

Social institutions [like schoos] will shape the technology, even as the technology provides raw material for the reshaping of institutions. Every new technology creates a vacuum of imagination, and the imagination of the West takes definite forms. One of these forms of imagination begins with a dualism between the corrupt world of the flesh and the purity of the spirit. In the Internet world this form of imagination gives us cyberspace, the technological equivalent of heaven, the purely abstract space-apart that is constructed from the mathematical ideals of computing (Wertheim 1999). The cultural movement around virtual reality in the early 1990s was one version of cyberspace, and another is the concept of an online community. Of course, Western imagination is not all wrong, and there do exist virtual reality technologies and online communities.

Nonetheless, experience is making clear that the idea of cyberspace is misleading, and that the uses of advanced information technologies do not constitute a space apart from ordinary reality (Wynn and Katz 1997). Quite the contrary, for most purposes advanced information technologies are deeply bound up with the rest of the world.

Virtual reality is simply one end of a spectrum of applications, each of which embeds networked hardware and software into the world in a different way. It is the great philosophical virtue of ubiquitous computing technologies and spontaneous wireless networking protocols like Bluetooth to make this clear, and to help tear down the ancient mind/body divisions that have long narrowed our conceptions of computing and of ourselves. - Philip Agre UCLA