Top Highlights

• Because communication—which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about—is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
• Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives.
• We see evidence for that already. A farmer in America—the hero of the agricultural economy—rides in a portable office on his tractor. It’s air conditioned, has a phone, a satellite-driven GPS location device, and sophisticated sensors near the ground. At home his computer is connected to the never-ending stream of weather data, the worldwide grain ...
• In the grand network we are now assembling, the size of the nodes is collapsing while the quantity and quality of the connections are exploding.
• How do you improve lettuce farming? Let the soil speak to the farmer’s tractors.