Seite 2: Heterogeneous

The information superhighway suggests homogeneity. The superhighway is the same mile after mile. The contemporary city is radically heterogeneous, and heterogeneity is a great virtue in the postmodern world. The homogeneous, the univocal, the universal have all become suspect. As a result, pre-urban environments are suspect because they enforce a spirit of conformity that is now associated with prejudice and cultural hegemony. Telepolis is not therefore quite the same as the global village , a term coined by Marshall McLuhan thirty years ago that has once again become popular and even (from a postmodern point of view) dangerously respectable. The Internet and cyberspace do seem radically heterogeneous - a mixture of voices, images, and agendas that are unified only at the operation level by the fact that all are expressed as binary units. This operational unity, which once seemed so important to historicans of technology, now seems to be hardly a limitation at all, for the bits can be hidden so effectively that the user need know nothing of them.