Cyberspace and the Ecotopian dream
Ralph Abraham · World Futures · 2000
In his recent book The Alphabet vs the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that we are presently in the midst of an iconic revolution in which written language is being superceded by a new visual language, and that this represents a return of the Goddess to her prehistoric and rightful place. Despite the certain decline of literacy in our time, we feel that the new medium is actually a partnership of written and iconic languages—namely, hypermedia: the multimedia text, hypertext, and hypergraphic medium of the World Wide Web—and that this presages a return of the partnership aspect of prehistoric societies. While the World Wide Web is indeed collective knowledge, it will not truly be collective intelligence in the sense of Pierre Levy until it combines hypermedia with the computer modeling and simulation of natural and social systems by means of complex dynamical systems techniques. This paper relates this vision of a dynamic cyberspace with the ecotopian dreams of our time.