It is a typical weekday morning. I rise at 7:00 a.m., put on the coffee, and go to my desk to look at the day’s papers — the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and London Telegraph. I read a letter from a friend in Germany, a letter he wrote late the previous evening. My 12-year-old niece in Poughkeepsie breaks in with an "instant message" to tell me what she’ll be doing in school that morning; we chat back and forth a bit before we must break off and get on with our days. Such are the wonders of the Digital Age (as some insist on calling it) — instant access to seemingly unlimited information, instant communication across formidable distances. Urgency is the spirit of the times: everything is happening faster because it can happen faster. The future has arrived, and we can view it through the windows of our computer screens. In elementary and secondary schools throughout the country, children are learning to connect to the world through computers; at colleges and universities students are busy mastering one software program after another in the hope of "staying current" — that is, of being marketable upon graduation. As more and more information becomes available through the World Wide Web, an increasing number of people find it impossible, or at least extremely inconvenient, to make do without access to it. As the electronic transmission of information becomes commonplace, more and more people anxiously check their e-mail accounts several times a day for fear of missing some "urgent" bit of information and being left "out of the loop." For the Digital Age has also been tagged the Information Age, and the amount of information out there is staggering. Web sites are proliferating like bacteria, with no way of distinguishing the good from the bad, the benign from the malignant. We are, as a culture, increasingly enmeshed in a web of information, in which everything is con-nected to everything else like an enormous cybernetic feedback network.