On the screen a picture appears, built up in stages, line by line. First it looks like a set of coloured bars. Then some more are added, and gradually the image becomes sharper and clearer until a colour picture appears in the centre of the screen. It is a cityscape. In the foreground are honey-coloured buildings and a solitary high-rise block; in the distance is the sea. Away to the left is a suspension bridge, wreathed in fog. It is in fact a panoramic view of San Francisco, snapped by a camera fixed on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. The bridge is the Golden Gate. Underneath the photograph is some text explaining that it was taken three minutes ago will be updated every five minutes. The man sits there patiently and waits, and in a few minutes the image flickers briefly and is indeed rebuilt before his eyes. Nothing much has changed, except that the camera has moved slightly. It has begun its slow pan rightwards, towards the Bay Bridge.

And as the picture builds the solitary man smiles quietly, for to him this is a kind of miracle...

It’s late. Somewhere, in another part of the house, a man can be heard snoring. Between the beds is a table, on which sits a large radio with a brown bakelite shell, an illuminated dial, a large tuning knob. The radio is turned towards one of the beds, in which lies a young boy who is staring intently at the dial and slowing turning the knob. The light from the dial illuminates his face. Through the ventilation slots in the back of the radio can be seen the glow of thermionic valves.

The boy is entirely focussed on the sounds coming from the loudspeaker of the radio. Mostly, these are strange whistling noises, howls, bursts of static, occasional frantic sequences of Morse code. He continues gingerly to rotate the knob and eventually stops when a distant voice, speaking in English, suddenly issues from the radio's grille. The voice waxes and wanes and echoes oddly. It sounds like someone speaking through a very long pipe which is continually flexing. But the boy is transfixed by it for this is what he has been searching for -- a voice from another continent, another world. He smiles quietly, for to him this is a kind of miracle.

I am that man, and was once that boy. What connects the two is a lifelong fascination -- call it obsession if you like -- with communication, with being able to make links to other places, other cultures, other worlds. The roots of this obsession have often puzzled me. I am not -- never have been -- a gregarious person. Quite the opposite. I was a solitary child and my class mates at school and university always thought of me as a loner. I was never enamoured of the noisy solidarity of pub or club. So why was I possessed of a desire to make contact with distant places?

It can partly be explained by the start I had in life. I grew up on what seemed at the time like the edge of the world – in a remote part of rural Ireland, in a household with few books, magazines or television. The only newspapers which ever crossed the threshold were the Irish Press – the organ of Eamonn de Valera's Fianna Fail party, and the Irish Catholic, an equally pious propaganda sheet for the Vatican. The only books were a few Reader's Digest 'condensed' books plus an edition of Newnes Pictorial Encyclopaedia bound in a red leatherette material which matched the upholstery of the household's two armchairs. (Only the rich and sophisticated had three-piece suites in those days.) Films were a no-go area; although there was a cinema in the town, it screened only what the parish priest approved, and even then was off-limits to us, because my mother regarded Hollywood as an agent of Satan. Our household was thus what Al Gore would call an 'information-poor' environment.

It's hard now to imagine what life was like then. Foreign travel was unheard-of, for example. Apart from those who emigrated to Britain or the United States, virtually nobody we knew had ever been abroad, and those who had were invariably people who had made a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Nobody ever went overseas on holiday, and no foreign languages were taught in the schools I attended – with the exception of Latin, no doubt because it was useful for those who went on to the priesthood. We lived in a closed society which thought of itself as self-sufficient, the embodiment of the ancient Republican slogan, Sinn Fein – Irish for 'ourselves alone'.

There was, however, one chink of light in the suffocating gloom -- the radio (which we called the wireless; ‘radio’ was a posh word, unthinkable in our circle, uttered only by those who had lunch at the time we had dinner). It was by modern standards, a huge apparatus powered by valves – which is why it took some time to warm up – and a 'magic eye' tuning indicator -- a greenish glass circle that winked at you as the signal waxed or waned.

The tuning knob was a marvellous affair. The spindle went through a hole in the glass of the dial. On the other side, it drove a large metal wheel to which a cord was attached. As the wheel turned, a metal bar hanging from the cord moved horizontally to indicate the wavelength currently being sought. A small lamp provided a backlight and, emerging through the ventilation slots at the back of the device, threw weird shadows on my bedroom wall.

The legends etched on the dial face were wonderful. There were some numerical markings, but generally stations were identified by the location of the transmitter. Thus the BBC Long Wave programme (source of Radio Newsreel and Dan Dare) was 'Droitwich'; Netherlands Radio was 'Hilversum'; Radio Luxembourg was, reasonably enough, 'Luxembourg'; and Radio Eireann, our native broadcaster, was 'Athlone'. On the Long Wave band I remember Minsk and Kalundbourg, Ankara on 1700 metres and Brasov on 1950. On Medium Wave there were stations based in Bordeaux, Stockholm, Rennes, Vienna and somewhere called Muhlacker. To my impressionable mind, these locations took on ludicrously glamorous connotations. I can still remember the day, decades later, when I stumbled on Droitwich on the A5 and discovered what a mundane place it really was. But back in the Fifties it seemed as exciting to me as Paris or Berlin or Istanbul.

The best thing about our wireless, though, was that it had a short-wave band. This was the source of endless fascination to me, because it meant that even with this primitive device one could listen to the world.

At first I couldn't understand how it worked. Why was reception so much better at night? Why it was so infuriatingly variable? I asked my father, who looked evasive and said it was something to do with 'the whachamacallit sphere’ (he always called complicated things the whachamacallit), but this gave me enough of a steer to go to the local Carnegie Library and start digging. In due course I discovered that he was referring to the ionosphere -- a layer of charged particles high up at the edge of the earth's atmosphere which acts as a kind of reflector for radio waves of certain frequencies. The reason short-wave radio could travel such huge distances was that it used the ionosphere to bounce signals round the world -- which was why radio hams in Latin America or Australia could sometimes be heard by a young boy on the Western seaboard of Ireland. Signals from such distant shores were more likely to get through at night because then the ionosphere was higher and transmission over longer distances was possible.

I was spellbound by this discovery of how technology could piggy-back on a natural phenomenon to propel low-power signals through immense distances. But most of all I was entranced by the idea of short-wave radio. For this was a technology which belonged not to great corporations or governments, but to people. It was possible, my father explained, to obtain a licence to operate your own short-wave radio station. And all over the globe people held such licences which enabled them to sit in their back rooms and broadcast to the whole world. And to me.

My father was simultaneously pleased and threatened by my interest in short-wave radio. It was something he himself had been passionately interested in as a young man. But even then I sensed that he also felt undermined by my youthful enthusiasm. I remember the look of alarm on his face when I returned triumphantly from the library having figured out the secret of the ionosphere. Later – much later – I realised that my naïve obsession forced him to acknowledge that he had never managed to carry his own passion to its logical conclusion and become a radio ham. He thought this made him look a failure in the eyes of his eldest son.

In fact, his failure moved me more to frustration than to pity. I was mad simply because Da’s non-possession of an amateur radio operator's licence meant that I was deprived of an opportunity to participate in this magical process. Listening to short-wave transmissions was bliss; but to be able to send them would be absolute heaven.

Da's interest in radio had been awakened in the 1930s, when he was an ambitious young postal clerk in Ballina, Co. Mayo. He had been trained in Morse (because that was the way telegrams were transmitted in rural Ireland) and to his dying day retained a wonderful fluency in that staccato lingo. It was from him, for example, that I learned that Morse operators do not listen -- as Boy Scouts do -- for the dots and dashes of each letter. Instead they listen for patterns and rhythms. He illustrated this by teaching me the rhythm of CQ -- the international signal which asks 'Is anybody out there listening?'. The Boy Scout version is dash-dot-dash-dash, dash-dash-dot-dash. But my father sang it as dahdeedahdah, dahdahdeedah and immediately I understood what he meant.

My father had left school at 16 and gained entry to the fledgling Irish Free State's postal service by doing a competitive examination. He was highly intelligent and quietly ambitious, but these were no guarantees of preferment in the civil service. By the standards of people from his background, he was doing well to have become a postal clerk in his twenties. His position was prized because it was secure. It was, his mother crowed, a job for life. He was working for the government. But it was poorly paid.

Early on in his time in Ballina, Da became interested in amateur radio. In those days a candidate for an operator's licence had several obstacles to overcome. First he had to pass two examinations -- one in Morse, the other in the physics and mathematics of wireless propagation -- stuff about frequency and capacitance and inductance and Ohm’s Law and resistances in series and parallel. The other obstacles were less formal, but no less forbidding to a man in Da's position. The aspiring broadcaster had to have a suitable premises (universally called, for some reason, a 'shack'), together with sufficient land to set up a substantial antenna, and enough money to purchase the necessary kit.

Of these, the only hurdle Da had been able to overcome was the first -- his Morse was more than adequate. But his truncated schooling left him terrified of the theoretical examination. As a young batchelor living in 'digs' (a rented room in a small family house) he could not have a suitable shack. And his wages as a clerk would not have run to any fancy equipment for, like most men of his background, he sent much of it home to his parents in Connamara.

As a result, he never managed to indulge his passion for radio and instead had to content himself with looking over the shoulders of others more affluent than himself. Often the quid pro quo was that he taught Morse to these rich kids. In particular, there was one chap, the heir of a prosperous Ballina merchant family, who had obtained a licence in the 1930s and with whom Da had become genuinely friendly.

My father never told me any of this, of course. But he once did something that explained everything. It happened on a Summer's evening in the 1950s when I was about ten. We were back in Ballina, on holiday, and he suddenly asked me if I would like to go and see Ian Clarke's shack. Knowing that Mr. Clarke was a licensed 'ham' I clambered breathlessly into the car and we drove out of the town along the banks of the Moy, eventually turning through some large gates into a winding, tree-lined drive which swept round to reveal one of those glorious Georgian boxes which were the Irish Ascendancy's main contribution to civilisation.

I had never seen a house like this up close, let alone been inside one. It had double doors, a marbled hall two stories high and a glorious curving staircase. The drawing room had huge windows which seemed to stretch from floor to ceiling. One set opened onto a manicured lawn which led down to the river. There was not one, not two but three settees arranged in an open rectangle around a coffee table. While I stood stupefied by these surroundings, a middle-aged, affable man appeared, greeted me solemnly and got my father a drink.

After a while, he turned to me and said 'Your Daddy tells me you're interested in radio. Would you like to see my set-up?' 'Yes, please, Mr. Clarke', I burbled, terrified in case I should make a fool of myself. 'Well, come on then'. He led the way out of the room and up that huge staircase. I remember how quiet the house seemed, and how our feet made no sound on the carpet. We turned into a high-ceilinged room with a large window. There was a desk with a microphone, some books and a notepad on it. To the right of the desk was a rack of equipment garnished with lights, dials, knobs and switches.

He gave me a cursory explanation of the kit, then switched the various units on -- power supply, receiver, transmitter, amplifier. One by one the lights came on. Then he sat down at the desk, made an entry in a log, twiddled a knob and spoke into the mike. 'CQ, CQ, CQ, this is...' -- and here he gave his call-sign -- '...calling.' He repeated this a few times while I held my breath. And then faintly, but distinctly, came an answering voice. An amateur radio operator somewhere in Scandinavia. He and Mr. Clarke then had a conversation, probably fairly banal, and involving the ritual exchange of information about their respective technical set-ups, but all I remember of it was that he mentioned at one point that he had 'a young friend with him who hoped one day to become a ham himself', at which point I nearly passed out.

I remember little else of that evening, save that my father and Mr. Clarke talked for ages about the past and of what they used to do in their batchelor days. Later, driving home in the dark, I asked, 'Da, is Mr. Clarke very rich?' He replied, laconically, 'Well, he doesn't want for a bob or two anyway' and I finally understood why my father had never obtained his licence.

The comparison of the Net with the early days of radio works not just on a personal level. The first radio enthusiasts were much ridiculed by the chattering classes of the day. They were seen as cranks with their weird equipment -- crystals, antennae, coils, cat's whiskers, horns -- and laughed at because of their willingness to spend long hours waiting to hear the crackling hiss of a distant broadcast. What made them seem even more absurd in the eyes of their tormentors was the fact that there was ‘nothing much on the radio anyway’, certainly nothing worth listening to.

Much the same is said about today's Net enthusiasts. They are ridiculed as socially-challenged nerds or 'anoraks' huddled in bedrooms surrounded by equipment and glowing screens. Their willingness to persevere in the teeth of transmission delays and the limitations of low-bandwidth telephone lines is derided by those who describe the World Wide Web as 'the Worldwide Wait'. The notion that any adult person would sit patiently while a low-resolution colour picture slowly chugs its way through the Net seems absurd to those who are far too busy with important matters like watching television or reviewing tomorrow's list of engagements in their personal organisers. The 'plug-ins' by which Webheads set such store -- those programs which extend the capability of browsers like Netscape to handle digital audio, compressed movies and other exotic data streams -- seem as weird as the cat's whiskers of yesteryear. And, of course, there is always the refrain about there being 'nothing worthwhile on the Internet’.

So it is deeply ironic that one of the most evocative uses of the Net is as a medium for radio broadcasts. My national radio station, for example, is RTE in Ireland. Although it broadcasts in stereo from the Astra satellite, I cannot receive it in Cambridge because I do not have a satellite dish. I like to listen to the news in Irish because it keeps my knowledge of the language from atrophying. There must be quite a few like me in the 70-million-strong Irish diaspora dispersed all over the globe.

Now, through a wonderful piece of software technology called RealAudio, I can listen to the news in Irish no matter where I am in the world. What happens is that RTE puts the daily bulletins on a computer running special software which turns it into a RealAudio server. If I wish to listen to a bulletin, I click on the hotlink to it on a Web page and after a short interval, the rich sound of a native speaker comes rolling out of the speakers on either side of my computer. The quality is sometimes relatively poor -- about the same as AM signals. Sometimes the transmission breaks up and distorts -- just as those long-distant broadcasts of my youth did. But it still seems like a small miracle.

It's funny how touching this wonder can be. Last year, my eldest son was doing a project on the poetry of Robert Frost. His task was to make a film about The Road Not Taken and he dropped in to ask if I knew where he could get his hands on a recording of Frost reading the poem. My first reaction was to telephone the BBC. But then I suggested -- with nothing more than a mild sense of optimism -- that he try hunting for it on the Web. In a few minutes he had found a scholarly archive somewhere in the United States with recordings of Frost, and shortly after that we both sat stunned, listening to the poet's gravelly voice, distorted by compression and data corruption, but still speaking directly to our hearts. And I thought: this is what the early days of radio must have been like.

Most beginners are confused about what exactly the Internet is. When they ask me, I always suggest they think about it as analogous to the tracks and signalling in a railway network – the basic infrastructure. Just as different kinds of trains, trucks and locomotives run on a rail network, so too various kind of traffic runs on the Internet. And just as on many rail systems, different companies provide different kinds of passenger services, so the Net has different services offering various kinds of facilities.

The service which just brought me Feed magazine is called the World Wide Web, so-called because it encloses the globe in a web of billions of electronic threads. I have just woven such a thread from my home near Cambridge to a computer in Scotland. But it could just as easily have gone to the other side of the world.

You don’t believe me? Well, try this.

First, find a ‘search engine’ -- one of the computers which index the hundreds of millions of Web pages currently available on-line. Search engines ceaselessly trawl the Net, indexing what they find. The oneI want to use now is called AltaVista. It’s located in the research labs of Digital (a well-known computer company now owned by Compaq) in Palo Alto, California. Its Web address or ‘Uniform Resource Locator’ (URL for short) is "http://www.altavista.digital.com", and I could get it by typing that text in the ‘Location’ box at the top of my browser window. But because I use AltaVista a lot, I have bookmarked its address on a list of regularly-used sites. I click on the ‘Bookmarks’ item on the Netscape menu bar. A drop-down menu appears on which the words ‘Search engines’ appear. Click on that and a list of engines appears, including AltaVista. Click on that and...

In less than three seconds, AltaVista has replied, placing on my screen a box in which I can type whatever it is I wish to search for. In this case it is "Salk Institute" – the American research institute set up by Jonas Edward Salk, the inventor of the vaccine which eliminated polio -- so I type that, then click on a little image of a push-button labelled ‘Submit’.

My request flashes across the world to Palo Alto. AltaVista searches through its index of 30 million Web pages held on 275,600 computers and 4 million articles from over 8,000 Internet discussion groups, and then sends me a list of the best matches. If I wish to go straight to an item on the list, I simply click on it. The whole process -- from my typing ‘Salk Institute’ to the arrival of the search result has taken less than ten seconds. I don’t know what you call that, but I call it astonishing.

The dynamo was the machine which made our modern, electricity-based civilisation possible. The Internet is its contemporary equivalent: it is the thing which threatens and promises to transform our future and is just as awe-inspiring in its power and scope and potential.

But how can one convey this to those who have not experienced it? A standard ploy is to quote the astonishing statistics of the thing. Nobody really knows how many people actually use the Net, but as I write, the best estimates suggest a user population of about between 120 and 150 million -- roughly equivalent to the combined populations of several major industrial states. Other estimates are even higher.

Then there is the dizzying growth of the thing. I’m not going to bore you with the numbers, but it might help to relate them to those for more familiar media. It took radio 37 years to build an audience of 50 million and television about 15 years to reach the same number of viewers. But it took the World Wide Web just over three years to reach its first 50 million users!

Then there is all the stuff that is published on the Net, mainly in the form of Web pages. Again nobody knows for sure how much there is (or was, because since you started on this page a sizeable number have been added), but when Digital engineers were designing the AltaVista indexing system in 1995 they estimated that the Web then contained just under one terabyte of data -- that is, just under a thousand gigabytes or a million megabytes. Just to give you a feeling for what that represents, the text of this book occupies about 400,000 bytes (0.4 megabytes), so that the estimated size of the Web four years ago was equivalent to 2,500,000 texts of this length. "Imagine", wrote AltaVista’s creators,

that you set out with a browser and clicked to a site and jotted down what you saw and checked to see if you had seen it before. Then you clicked on another link and another link, each time checking to see if it was new. It would take time to get to each page and more time to get links to sites you hadn't been to before. And if you built a program that went through those same operations, nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, it might only get about a page a minute, or fewer than 1500 pages a day. At that rate, it would take such a program more than 182 years to look at the 100 million pages in our index today.

Several years on, God knows how much larger the resource has become. One estimate puts the number of documents available on the Net in 1998 at 400 million and predicts that this would rise to 800 million by the year 2000.

The trouble with these stupefying statistics is that they do not actually convey the true scale of the

phenomenon. What does it mean for God’s sake to have 90 -- or 190 or 250 -- million people on-line? Who can imagine such a thing? Immanuel Kant once observed that the capacity to ‘take in’ great magnitudes is ultimately aesthetic rather than purely logical. He illustrated this with a French general’s account of how, on a visit to the great Pyramids, he was unsure about how to truly feel the emotional impact of their sheer enormity. Approach too close and you see only stone upon stone and miss the full sweep from base to apex; move too far away, on the other hand, and you lose the sense of awe that something so vast was constructed block by back-breaking block. (The biggest stones, remember, weighed upwards of 200 tonnes and were up to 9 metres long, and many of them were hauled up a ramp which must have been at least a mile long.)

However the data are discounted and adjusted and filtered, though, the inescapable fact remains that the Internet has been growing at near-exponential rates for years and shows no signs of slowing down. We have therefore long passed the point where it was sensible to conjecture that the thing might turn out to be the CB radio de nos jours: this is no fad or passing fancy, but a fundamental shift in our communications environment. This is for real. The Net is where it’s @, to use the symbology of the digital age. We have hitched a ride on a rocket, and none of us has a clue where it’s headed.

And anyway, you don't need to resort to theories about the mechanics of digital replication to explain why the Net is different from anything we’ve seen before. For the conventional definition describing it as a global network of computer networks contains an elementary schoolboy mistake.

It makes no mention of people.

The Net is really a system that links together a vast number of computers and the people who use them. And it’s the people who make it really interesting. They use it for lots of things that human beings like to do (including, increasingly, shopping) but mostly they use it to communicate. And it’s the phenomenon of 120+ million people freely communicating via such an efficient and uncensored medium that gives the Net its special character and its extraordinary power.

In global terms, the wired population, though sizeable, is only a subculture, and a peculiar one at that. It’s heavily skewed towards the developed world, for example; indeed, how could it be otherwise when there are more telephones in Manhattan than in the whole of Africa? And even within Western countries, the ‘digerati’ tend to be drawn from their affluent, educated, articulated elites – though that may be changing faster than many people realise.

Howard Rheingold denies there is such a thing as a single, monolithic, online culture. "It’s more like an ecosystem of subcultures", he says,

some frivolous, others serious. The cutting edge of scientific discourse is migrating to virtual communities, where you can read the electronic pre-printed reports of molecular biologists and cognitive scientists. At the same time, activists and educational reformers are using the same medium as a political tool. You can use virtual communities to find a date, sell a lawnmower, publish a novel, conduct a meeting. Some people use virtual communities as a form of psychotherapy. Others... spend eighty hours a week or more pretending they are somebody else, living a life that does not exist outside a computer.

Rheingold, who has been observing the Net from the beginning, thinks that people use the network in two basic ways: for entertainment and information; and to form what he calls ‘virtual communities’.

To people who have never ventured online, the idea of a virtual community must seem at best oxymoronic, at worst absurd. How can you have ‘communities’ of people who never meet, who mostly know very little about one another, and who are not linked by the bonds of obligation and custom which govern real communities?

Answer: you can’t, and it is stretching the term to refer to many of the myriad groupings which characterise Cyberspace today as ‘communities’. Real communities contain people you dislike or mistrust, as well as people who share your values. For that reason ‘virtual communities’ are often more like clubs or special-interest groups in which people gather to share their obsessions or concerns: Psion computers; ice-hockey; human rights violations in East Timor; quilting; the novels of Saul Bellow; white supremacy; Michael Jackson; M-series Leica cameras; political repression in Albania; the Glass Bead Game... you name it, there’s probably an Internet discussion group for it.

"How far can mediated contacts constitute community?", asks Frank Weinreich, a sociologist who has done a study of German bulletin-board users.

I believe they can not. You may get to know other people through CMC [Computer-mediated Communication], the Net will provide the means to maintain contact and interconnections between people and organizations. But they won't constitute communities because CMC cannot substitute for the sensual experience of meeting one another face-to-face. Trust, cooperation, friendship and community are based on contacts in the sensual world. You communicate through networks but you don't live in them.

But having said all that, there are also groupings on the Net for which the term ‘community’ does not seem entirely inappropriate. The most famous is the WELL, a San Francisco-based online group founded in the 1980s by a number of ageing Hippie entrepreneurs and visionaries originally centred on the Whole Earth Catalog, the 1968 handbook by Stewart Brand which became the unofficial bible of the counter-culture movement. The Catalog was a best-seller and Brand ploughed some of his resulting earnings into starting the Well. The name was derived – tortuously – from ‘Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link’.

Marc Smith, a sociologist who has studied it, maintains that the social ‘glue’ which binds the WELL into a genuine community is a complex blend of participants’ social skills, their amazing collective fund of expert knowledge (these are mainly Bay Area professionals, remember) and their willingness to support community members when they are in trouble.

This last characteristic is something that also lifts some special-interest online groups into a different category. Everybody who has spent any time on the Net knows of the extraordinary opportunities it provides for reaching out and helping others. "Here are a few people to talk to about the menace of Cyberspace", fumes Rheingold, with heavy irony:

The Alzheimer's caregiver afraid to leave the house who dials in nightly to a support group; the bright student in a one-room Saskatchewan school house researching a paper four hours from the nearest library; the suicidally depressed gay teenager; AIDS patients sharing the latest treatment information; political activists using the Net to report, persuade, inform; and the disabled, ill and elderly, whose minds are alive but who can't leave their beds. For them and for potentially millions of others like them, Cyberspace is a not just a lifeline, it can be better than the offline world.

The most paradoxical thing about the people who make up the Internet is that they are unimaginably diverse and yet at the same time are capable of behaving in quite concerted ways. One sees this most frequently whenever outside agencies (the US federal government, Scientology, authoritarian regimes in Asia, whatever) seek to interfere with the network or curtail its cherished freedoms. "The Net", wrote one of its early evangelists, John Gilmore, "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

When the US Congress in 1995 passed a law (the Communications Decency Act) attempting to regulate what could be transmitted over the Net, American politicians were astonished at the effectiveness and coherence with which the Internet community responded to the threat. Over 20,000 Websites – some of them heavily trafficked sites – turned their pages black in protest. Senators and Congressmen were deluged with critical or angry E-mail. Heavy legal artillery was trained on the Act – paid for by outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as the American Congress for Civil Liberties. In the end the Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in June 1997 and American legislators are still wondering what hit them.

The coherence of the Net is sometimes its most surprising quality. After all, it has no central authority, no body which determines who can join it and under what conditions. Anyone can hook a computer to the Internet, provided they can pay for the physical connection and run the standard software. Indeed, that is precisely the way it grows at such a fantastic rate. The thing is unimaginably complex -- and yet it works astonishingly well, passing enormous volumes of data every day with remarkable reliability. It is an example of a self-organising system, of something where there is order without control.

The computer graphics expert Loren Carpenter once invented a game which gives a flavour of this. At a 1991 computer conference in Las Vegas, he gave every one of the 5,000 delegates a cardboard wand coloured red on one side and green on the other. The delegates were then gathered in an auditorium facing a huge video screen linked to a computer running the ancient computer game called ‘Pong’. It’s like a crude electronic version of ping-pong -- a white dot bounces around inside a square and two movable rectangles act as paddles off which the ball bounce. At the back of the hall, a video-camera scanned the sea of wands and fed its images back to a bank of computers which calculated what proportion were showing red, and what proportion green.

Delegates in the left hand side of the auditorium controlled the left-hand paddle; those on the right controlled the right-hand one. Anyone who thought the paddle should go up was told to flash the red side of their wand; if they thought it should go down they were to flash green. When everything was ready Carpenter shouted ‘go’ and all hell broke loose. Kevin Kelly was there:

The audience roars in delight. Without a moment’s hesitation, 5,000 are playing a reasonably good game of Pong. Each move of the paddle is the average of several thousand players’ intentions. The sensation is unnerving. The paddle usually does what you intend, but not always. When it doesn’t, you find yourself spending as much attention trying to anticipate the paddle as the incoming ball. One is definitely aware of another intelligence online: it’s this hollering mob.