Michael Ventura

     "2000", "The year 2000...." That date has been hanging over us all our lives. The phrase itself has become a staple (基本内容) of our language, representing the moment when the real future begins.

    In less than six years that date will be a commonplace: we'll be writing it on our letters; we'll see it on our newspapers and on our license plates (汽车牌照). And after all this anticipation, we will wake to the year 2000 surprised, perhaps even amazed, to find that the citizens of the 21st century are not a marvelous generation of some brave new world (美好的新世界); no, they are only you and I. Just us folks.

    I suspect that the first morning of the year 2000 will be very much like one of those mornings we've always had. On such a morning you don't feel very different from how you felt the day before. You look the same. Your dilemmas (困境) haven't changed. Your political and religious views are the same and so are your feelings for your family. You are hours older and not very much wiser, and you still go to work in the same car, or on the same bus, to pay the same rent or the same mortgage (抵押借款), if not more. It takes more than the dawn of the new millennium to change that.

   Lonely No More

    Many technologists, scientists, writers and even politicians assure us that the dilemmas of our new millennium will be addressed by what they call "the information superhighway." By this they mean the extension of a worldwide computer network already in the making -- a network which many are looking to with profound hope.

    Cities can be rearranged. Many businesses are run and managed by individuals working in their homes connected by computer to "virtual offices", though the workers are miles and even whole states apart. "Virtual communities" link individuals with mutual interests who communicate solely by computer, whether their focus is chess or the stock market, and any individual with a computer can belong to many virtual communities simultaneously. There is no need for loneliness in the virtual global village.

   Where Do We Turn?

    We look to the information superhighway to solve our economic problems. But we forget that while information aids in the making of things, it doesn't, in and of itself, do the making. People working in factories do most of the making. Information doesn't construct houses, harvest vegetables, herd cattle or build furniture. Even in the 21st century work will remain manual. And countries where such jobs abound may have a better chance than those countries where they don't -- especially when many millions of new workers join the worldwide work force every year.

    We look to the information superhighway to answer questions that occupy the edges of our daily lives, with facts and forecasts, speculation and statistics. But the questions we wake up with are concerned with more immediate things. Basic issues like the meaning of marriage, what it means to be a man or a woman, and how we should behave toward our children are like potholes (路面凹坑) in the sidewalk that we trip over every day. In these matters, so crucial to our daily happiness, we have no one to turn to but ourselves and each other in the 21st, as in any century.

                 (608 words)