People in the Information Society are adaptable and fast on their feet. They're all road warriors with laptops. They don't need a big clunky ranch house with a white picket fence; they're living out of the back of a Ferrari. Which is very cool. Unless your grandmother loses her ranch house because the entire economy has downsized and devolved into a viral mess. Then your grandmother decides that she has to move into the back seat of the Ferrari with you. Then you and your fleet-footed highly wired lifestyle look a tad less cozy. It becomes a tad hard to tell the jetsetters from the gypsies in that situation.
All this free-floating anxiety you've been feeling suddenly comes home to roost. Who's logging those frequent-flyer miles, and who's merely homeless? It's great to cut fine distinctions between the keyboard punching virtual class and the rust-belt lumpenproletariat, but a real no-kidding aristocracy has a host of ways to tell Us from Them. The Information Age doesn't have that, it moves too fast for elegant manners. In the Information Age, you can be a physicist with four post-docs and still drive a cab. It's market-driven this and market driven that, market-driven dog and market-driven cat. In the Information Society, the invisible hand of the market isn't a human hand. It never was, but now its nature is obvious. It's some kind of spastically twitching titanium-coated manipulator.
In the Information Society we like to believe that knowledge is power. Because it is, sort of kind of. On alternate Tuesdays, maybe. People like to say that the so-called knowledge found on the Internet is empowering to the individual. Is it really?
Let's try a thought experiment. Let's imagine you have a brain tumor. You're in big trouble, but luckily, you're on the Internet. You could try to find a brain