This used to mean that College Professors were under pressure to publish something scholarly to buttress their careers and help qualify for "tenure." Tenure is a form of guaranteed employment. It was implemented to provide the scholar with the "intellectual freedom" to teach and publish without interference from institutional biases and community pressures.

The expression was coined in an era that could not have possibly anticipated an Internet with 700 million subscribers nor the immense volumes of information being published and available to a worldwide audience.

The expression is still valid but takes on new meaning in the Networked Society.

What it means in our contemporary context, is what might be called the Internet Imperative. Simply put, you must get your individual or company ideas represented on Internet, or be relegated to obscurity.

In a recent survey we ran, 98% of respondents said that a Website was mandatory for companies. That answer, while accurate for the group tested, is too obvious and is like saying that a shop needs a storefront so people know it is there.

The question that remains is "what is the Networked Society," in terms of a sociological phenomena? Is it simply a giant phone book or encounter group, with tenuous paths between participants? Or is it the beginning of something that has more cohesion and structure and may, in time, become a new, recognized, and active form of human institution?

Were a minor percentage of Internet participants to undertake an economic, political, or social viewpoint, it would likely be the most powerful influence ever focused on a single issue. Simply the weight of numbers, could hardly be ignored or swept aside. But that hasn't happened. It is a matter of when, not if?

My sense is that understanding the social implications of Internet will take much more time to develop. At the moment Internet is too new, too large, growing too fast and far too complex for there to be a meaningful or complete analysis. What we can offer are structures or patterns that we feel are unique to the Networked Society.

Our list currently includes:

• Internet size: an estimated 700 million subscribers
• Factoid: Most of contemporary knowledge is now in digital form, and much of that is available on Internet
• Size of the infomass: 2.3 terabytes accessible on-line (305 times the Library of Congress)
• email - 400,000 terabytes annually
• Language extensions - short text abbreviations and emoticons
• blogs - web diaries - 10+ million bloggers
• Collaborative (bottom-up) behavior - volunteer programmers writing Linux
• Self organizing groups (bottom-up management) - eBay - a corporation run & managed by participants
• Communities of interest - Millions of people that share a common idea or purpose
• Indexing & finding information - Goggle's search engine searching 3.2 billion pages, as one of 807,000 search sites.

This is a list of "factoids," not a comprehensive list nor does it contain an empirical, scientific approach to the topic. We leave that task to others. (See this material for a very lucid and cogent set of arguements and well documented observations - Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb. by Keith Hampton & Barry Wellman at:

www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1046/ j.1535-6841.2003.00057.x/enhancedabs/)

What has become obvious, is that if your views are to be voiced in the Networked Society, the Internet is the publishing medium that reaches the largest audience at the lowest cost. That is a powerful motivation to utilize it.

As time passes the relentless progress stated in Moore's Law - that component density doubles every 18 months - will substantially increase functionality while lowering cost. This will bring network access to a larger percentage of the world's population. Being a citizen of the Networked Society may become an enfranchisement to the family of man.

Terry and Lisa Wellman

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