Past visions of cyberspace

As a science-fiction fan, I am, of course, interested in expired visions of the future. History keeps generating fresh ones.

Before Clay Shirky made that speech that I mentioned earlier, he wrote an essay that made many of the same points. In it he mentioned something that I've found fascinating for some time:

When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.

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Celestia

If you do want to fly around in a 3D virtual space, it's hard to beat this one.