A Really, Really Different World

You are, in the next moments, about to read a "book" on CHANGE that does not yet exist.

It's not in print. It's not on a server in one place or another.

It patiently awaits somewhere in a future space-time continuum.

It will be created on the fly. Instantly.

Best of all,
YOU are the author.

Your book will be quite different than ours.

Different from all others.

Unique.

Individual.

Yours only.

How is this possible?

Consider that Mind, Cyberspace, and Hyperlinks are not in physical space. They are in virtual space without any extension, distance, or mass.

In this unique world there can be tachyons --- things that move faster than the speed of light.

For instance you can imagine traveling to the Andromeda Galaxy in just a few milliseconds.

Amazingly, your imagination doesn't care if it's over 2.1 million light-years away.

Now, if you could actually travel at the speed of light (280,000 miles per second), it would take 2.1 million years to get there; another 2.1 million years to get back.

(We'll keep the light on for you.)

We're talking VIRTUAL REALITY here.

There is no physical form or mass.

“Yeah BUT", you emphatically say, "everybody's gotta be someplace.”

Indeed true. Certainly, our brains are needed for Mind to exist and Cyberspace requires a hard drive on which it can exist.

Your wonderful IMAGINATION creates the doors.

Doors through which Cyberspace is reached, navigated, and explored.

However, the SIZE of our brains, imagination, and hard drives are not related to the size or contents of Cyberspace.

Virtual Reality is created by people imagining and interacting; the number of times interaction occur, the types of interaction, and the directions of interaction.

On the World Wide Web, the most basic form of interactivity is known as the HyperLink or just plain “Link”.

Let's see what Dr. Leon James has to say:

“Cyberspace is like a mind in two important respects -- interactivity and organization.

Minds interact through organized content. That is, our mind communicates with other minds and the content of the exchange is organized by topic and by attitudes towards the topic.

Cyberspace is made up of topics and access doors to these topics. Topics create zones of networked interactions.

Popular sites on the Web or Portals become whirlpools of information exchange with hundreds of thousands of people examining the same set up simultaneously.

Cyberspace is in effect the communal mind for the inquiring mind.

Look at what happens.

By the simple act of physically clicking on any link, your imagination sends you through the door to a specific address in amazing Cyberspace.

A door that opens the universe to your mind.

"Consider creating a Page which is rendered as a Table of Contents of a book and its title.

You can click on each chapter and section and read the book in sequence, and you can learn from it and enjoy it.

Yet the book does not exist in the ordinary sense of a book that was written by someone.

It is not cataloged anywhere.
No one has published it.
No one claims it.
No one even knows of it.

The Table of Contents of this book is made of hypertext links to pieces of text appearing in all sorts of documents around the world.

The reader may not be aware that the book does not exist.

Dr. James continues ...

How many such books are there? The Internet in 1996 already contains billions of words, sentences, paragraphs.

There is no calculable limit to the number of virtual books one can create out of this textual mass, now growing at an unimaginable rate.

Hypertext is a virtual electronic library ...

- without walls,
- without limits,
- can't be cataloged,
- forever growing as a representation of the communal mind.

Virtual books are in effect navigation vehicles in hypertext.

Consider a virtual Home Page site. Physically its embodiment is minute, no more than 100K on a computer drive.

But virtually it may be a huge site put together through links that bring in text and audiovisual presentations from other places.

This virtual Web site does not actually exist anywhere, only its modest shell, which in actuality is a list of links.

No one owns this site, though the physical elements and components located on the other sites have legal owners by copyright and intellectual property.

How many such virtual web sites are there? They are numberless, growing within the interstices of cyberspace. Navigating cyberspace is an endless journey.

The communal mind is vast in comparison to the individual's mind.

The virtual library, the virtual book, the virtual site, and the virtual community -- these are the products of hypertext.

They give rise to virtual families and friends, virtual universities and conferences."