The effective and successful publishers driving towards the Millennium on the Infobahn will be looking forward through the windshield and not into their rearview mirrors when they publish on the Internet. Surely some of these successful publishers will cast a backward, nostalgic glance at the product-driven paper publishers of yesterday, those men and women fearful of losing control of their content, and protective of their precious bottled words, fearful of letting loose the leaves from the countless books, magazines, and newspapers that have contained humanity's thoughts and ideas for 500 years. Instead of purveyors of the printed word, millennial publishers are more likely to assume the role of real-time thought enablers, purveyors of experience. If half of the continental US disappeared in a mushroom cloud, this packet- switched network of networks, a protean meshwork of disparate machines all using a common protocol to communicate one with the other, is designed to reform itself and survive.
Packets are pieces of an electronic message, small portions of a whole.
Packets in an email message do not travel to their destination all in a row, like one nice neat line of type. Hypertext is analogous to packets in the sense that both involve breaking messages into many small pieces, constituent parts of a whole message. What distinguishes packets from hypertext is that the pieces of the message that they contain were broken apart independently of their meaning, and simply for ease of transmission from point A to point B. Hypertext, on the other hand, involves what might be seen as the molecularization and potential reconstituting of thought. This book began as scraps of paper buried under Mandela's jail cell floor during his 27 years of incarceration in South Africa. Now those scraps of paper have become real bits on the Internet, accessible to millions of people worldwide.