O futuro do mundo digital

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Rethinking the Digital Future

In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'

Is it David Gelernter's time to be rich?
Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He's also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World's Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.
To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he's been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today's. His preferred term is "lifestream." Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.
Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term "the cloud." But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.
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