The growth of the Internet has been similar to the adoption of many other technologies, such as radio and the telephone. In each case, the long, slow work of researchers and hobbyists reached the mainstream once the necessary infrastructure became available and manufacturing achieved economies of scale. Once such a technology achieves a critical mass of users, it quickly becomes more attractive to everyone else. Thus the recurring episodes of explosive growth. Yet despite their regularity, all of these historical episodes feel radically novel to the people who live through them.
Every important technology creates an imaginative vacuum.
A society can pour its profoundest hopes and fears into the millennialist excitement of that vacuum, and the technology will make them all seem new. But reality, we are learning, is more complicated than the simple promises of cyberspace. The Internet is an ideal medium for a global civil society, but it also makes the public sphere easier to monitor and regulate. The Internet supports the construction of efficient new market mechanisms, but it also amplifies the economies of scale that lead to industrial concentration. The Internet enables concerned citizens to mobilize for privacy protection, but it also facilitates the traffic in personal information.