"Traditionally,
you needed to go someplace to [communicate] -- to the agora, the forum,
the piazza, the café, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the
beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room,
the office, or the club -- and where you went pegged your peer group,
your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about
how you should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech,
and behavior and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar
species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the
worldwide computer network-the electronic agora-subverts, displaces, and
radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban
life. The Net has a fundamentally different physical structure, and it
operates under quite different rules from those that organize the action
in the public places of traditional cities. It will play as crucial a role
in twenty-first-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially
bounded, architecturally celebrated
agora did (according to Aristotle's Politics) in the life of the Greek
polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out
by the Milesians on their Ionian rock." William J. Mitchell, City of
Bits, 1996
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