THE Internet sags under the weight of commentary on its own present and short-term future. When commentators place the Net within a historical framework, though, the best they can generally do is to proclaim the medium's revolutionary nature. Baby boomers, in particular, enjoy nothing so much as declaring revolution. Media revolutions have happened before in history, and will happen again. Crude media analysts and theorists under the influence of Marx and Hegel, and more sophisticated ones such as Neil Postman and Sven Birkerts, tend to believe that media technologies take on a life and power of their own, one that overwhelms human institutions.
Humans turn their media to their own ends, declares The Soft Edge .
But Egyptian hieroglyphics prove an inadequate medium to spread Amenhotep IV's short-lived Egyptian monotheism three millennia earlier. The Soft Edge is now three years old. Unlike so many of its genre, it is becoming more powerful with the passage of time. But human desire twisted the technology into different shapes. Levinson notes, too, how the advent of word processing and the Web has disrupted the centuries of ever more simple media access.