6.5.1 Vice President Al Gore Jr.'s father was instrumental in the development of the US federal highway system, and Gore is continuing his father's trajectory by passionately endorsing the building of the "information highway." The effects of the interstate highways on society and communities cannot be understated, and the analogy to the digital highway is impossible to ignore. Patton writes in his history of the US interstate system that highways have had monstrous side effects by splitting communities into ghettos, displacing people, and crushing the intimacy of old cities: "While promising to bring us closer, highways in fact cater to our sense of separateness." (Patton, 1986, pg. 20)

6.5.2 Similarly, computer technology promised to save us time and provide a renewed sense of community. One of the most enthusiastic voices of this rhetoric is Howard Rheingold, who believes that computer networks are reviving the sense of co-operative spirit that so many people seemed to lose with the introduction of highways, that they will enable us "to rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life‹a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion." (1997, pg.110) Rheingold spent years on the WELL based in San Francisco and exemplifies the kind of New Age enthusiasm that the flower children of the Silicon Valley, now in middle age, have had for computing technologies. As discussed in chapter 4 on online identities and avatars, the initial architects are precisely the baby boom generation who saw potential for co-operative work and community with communication technologies. Rheingold refers to this group as the "Computer Counterculture." (1997, pg. 38) But now that it has become big, really big, business, even enthusiasts like Rheingold are getting worried: "Will we, through commercialisation and censorship lose the greatest resource ever for community building and the free expression of ideas? The anarchic development of the Internet, with all its problems, may turn out to be 'the good old days' we remember in retrospect." The Internet 2 is being conceived with a completely different motivation than the way the military initially approached construction of the ARPANET. Universities are being influenced and redirected in the process, becoming much more aligned with the industry's motivations driven by profit and product turnover. There is much less support for "pie in the sky" research and much more orientation toward product oriented approaches to research and development.

6.5.3 In the midst of this race with the clock, one man is raising a monument to the clock, a timepiece designed to last 10,000 years. Danny Hillis, a resident visionary in Walt Disney's Imagineering R&D division, is building a millennium clock that will tick annually, chime every thousand years and keep accurate time for 10,000 years. Hillis, who devised the concept of massive parallelism at MIT (which organises thousands of microprocessors to work at once) and formed the Thinking Machines research group, dreams of designing computers that are conscious devices. He says that "working on the fastest machine in the world, got me thinking about the slowest." (Levy, 1997, pg. 70) Building a 64,000 processor supercomputer forced him to think of nanoseconds, and something inside him started rejecting the idea of the world needing to go any faster. He began to question whether sufficient attention was given to centuries, to millenniums.

6.5.4 Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth catalogue, started the Long Now Foundation to help Hillis develop the millennial clock. Brian Eno (Roy Ascott's student) named the foundation, and after working with the clock says, "I am thinking about long-term projects. I ask not only what fruits I am getting, but what seeds I am planting." (Levy, 1997, pg. 72) The prototype was presented to the World Economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, urging its members to heed its story. And, in the age of "it's the economy, stupid" political campaigns, this was the proper venue to present this idea. Attention spans are short when time is money and the bills need to be paid month to month, when desire for new product drives our culture. How is this manifesting on the Internet, which was opened to commercial use in 1995? It is the time of attention economies, where ideas and personas once again take centre stage. [2]

6.5.5 As economies progressively shift to electronic commerce on the networks, it follows that digital artworks will take part of the market in some form. E-bay, [3] demonstrates clearly that the established systems will have a place in e-commerce, just as much of product commerce will. But there is an entire new economy emerging in tandem with an entire new paradigm in art and it is critically important to examine the possibilities of how these may merge. In other words, as digital arts become established, what shape may the market take, and what changes do audiences experience in relation to time and art? First, let's examine our highly complex relationship to time, which includes nature's rhythms, religion, politics, and human intrigue. [top]