New superheroes are showing up in the digital world, but the criteria for a superhero seems to be the value of their stock options rather than their character. Manufactured images and manufactured events are designed to keep us asleep. The Internet is a funhouse mirror of distortion as well as a potential source of redemption. But for a portal of truth and transformation to work, we must move through it with a child's heart, believing in spite of the evidence, while at the same time we connect warily with the images that constitute bars of a digital cage. Islands in the Clickstream is an intermittent column written by Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of computer technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives.
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