"Cyberspace is mirror of our own society...it's a mirror you can share with other people, a place where you can discover community..but it's also a mirror in the classic sense of smoke-and-mirrors. If you don't show up in that mirror in the next century, you're just not going to matter very much. Our kids matter. Our kids have to show up in that mirror"Bruce Sterling recently published an on-line book, _The Hacker Crackdown_ which he released free of charge to the cyberspace community as "literary freeware". This personifies his philosophy that all on-line resources, in particular literature, should be free/accessible to all learners.
Although a futurist, Sterling's imaginings also look back for models of equity of access to guide the future. He encourages educational lobbies to see the NII as an opportunity to create network media that would "match the splendid ambitions of Franklin with his public libraries and his mail system, and Jefferson and Madison with their determination to arm democracy with the power that knowledge gives.
Sterling aligns himself with interest groups that promote a public-interest vision of the NII to guarantee equitable and universal access to network services. Computer Professional for Social Responsibility (CPSR) is one group, in particular, that represents many facets of his philosophy including proposals that call for public access to government information and concern over the trend in recent years to turn over more information to private companies for distribution. In his novel, "Islands in the Net", Sterling portrays a distressing vision of the "Net" in which data is locked in computers and carefully rationed through multinational conglomerates; full access is a privilege held by few.
Sterling urges educators to have the courage to use the network to support their own values, to "bend the technology to their own purposes". Providing comprehensive access is critical in order to bring network literacy, what he calls "self-propelled, free training wheels for cyberspace" to children so that when children look deep into the mirror of cyberspace in the future they will be able to recognize their own face there.
