Sunday, November 24, 2002

Breakdown in Communications. In two years, New Jersey's once robust telecom industry has been ravaged. By Susan Warner. [New York Times: Technology] 10:20:57 AM

About TheFeature Revolutions come more rapidly today than in the past. In the old days, big industry wrought the wealth of nations in iron and steel. Today, information - accurately processed and rapidly accrued - is the fount of international wealth. But what before took decades today takes only months, weeks, days or even hours - thanks to the Internet. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a new revolution is now fast upon us. The Canadian visionary Marshall McLuhan predicted it more than 30 years ago, when he foresaw the convergence of media - text, audio, video, and interactivity. To this add a fifth element - mobility - and you have a formula for what will perhaps be the most sweeping change since the discovery of telephony itself. Soon, anytime, anywhere communications and access to vital information will be as routine and simple as switching on the television.... 7:36:25 AM

Working in the park Walker in the Wireless City By Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times, 11/24/02 It is a late autumn day in Bryant Park. Red and yellow leaves swirl around clusters of green folding chairs. People sit in the thin afternoon light, talking on cellphones, to others, to themselves. The scent of a piquant cigar mixes with the crisp tang of fall As I sit in this verdantly genteel place, a whole other flurry of movement and social interaction is going on around me, one invisible to the eye. I watch it on my laptop, the modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair, binoculars in hand, in "Rear Window." In the small browser window of my iBook's Airport card, an antenna of sorts, I find myself at the nexus of any number of the wireless networks that have come to blanket the city. 6:38:15 AM

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