Apparently the name referred originally only to a certain part of the city, the district near the gate that led to the temple area. A computer won't be necessary, thanks to devices that plug into telephones or phone lines. The e-mail boom has helped the world improve its written communication skills, says author Constance Hale. People are writing today where they would have been telephoning yesterday. So people are engaging with words more than they have for the last couple generations.
Machines can only do so much.
As the information stream gets faster and more and more data comes to us, the challenge will be to use it constructively, says writer Halton Mann. In coming decades the Internet will be able to diagnose its own problems and repair them, growing and maturing on its own, perhaps deciding who gets what information and who doesn't. In the end, producing a better understanding of one another is something technology can help us do, but can't do for us.