Being wired means never having a minute to yourself, never being out of touch, never off-duty. The global telecommunications network links the whole world in real time at ridiculously low costs, abolishing distance, accelerating the pace of change, and bringing the world together in interesting new ways. In Washington, the CIA is constantly tuned to CNN, which reports the news faster than any spy in an overseas embassy. And repressive regimes like China and North Vietnam wage a constant battle against foreign faxes, email and satellite transmissions that bypass government censors. When they write the history of the late 20th Century, it's the development of this instantaneous global information marketplace that will make the headlines, not the minor wars, trivial politics or monomaniacal subcultures that chew up so much newsprint and broadcast bandwidth today.
History has a way of sneaking up on science fiction.
Often, you have no idea that you're accessing pages from a computer halfway around the world, reading the news, chatting with friends or shopping and ordering products. Peace and harmony haven't yet descended upon the Earth, but you can retrieve 5 million web pages at your desk with a few keystrokes. Vice president Al Gore actually said something interesting about this emerging global environment. In the future, he noted, the barriers to communication would not be distance or cost but time zones. The abolition of space and time has its greatest effect on the commercial world, and sometimes the new technological expectations run ahead of the human reality.