Eyeing the costs of the tech boom

Less clear is the future for privacy rights. Technological advances have made it cheaper and easier for Americans to monitor each other. And in a post-Sept. 11 world, such efforts by government as well as individuals may well make Americans feel safer, despite the invasion of privacy.

But "a lot of that will be solved" if Congress passes centrist privacy legislation and businesses and individuals adopt new automated privacy tools, referred to as P3P, predicts Rob Atkinson predicts Rob Atkinson, director of the technology and new economy project of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank affiliated with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

The bigger challenge - the real downside of the New Economy - may be social and cultural, several observers argue.

"It's absolutely true we've entered an age of communication; it's equally true we have entered into ... a culture of distraction," says David Shenk, author of Data Smog, a 1998 manifesto about the dangers of information overload. "Getting constant news updates on CNN or constant flickers of electronic stimulus trying to get your attention as you're walking through the street - or your pager going off or your cellphone all the time ... it's just overwhelming.... You are a part of this frenzied culture where data to a maddening level is being used as a stimulus."

The info-flood will divide society, Mr. Shenk predicts, not between technology haves and have-nots but something deeper.

"The people who are well off, who are well educated, who have a free minute to think about their lives ... are going to have the resources to develop the discipline necessary to deal with this, by and large. And I fear the people on the other side of it, who don't have as much free time, who don't have the resources and education ... are going to be the victims of this stuff."

Info-saturated consumers may buy things they don't need. Data-overloaded workers may not advance. And that could prove ominous, warns Professor DeLong of the University of California, since these lesser-skilled US information workers could face competition from data-entry clerks in Asia or Latin America the same way that US factory workers in the 1980s saw overseas workers take their jobs.

And the perception of threats - from overseas competition to terrorism - may come at a quicker pace, thanks to technology's spread. "If we're all interconnected, good things can spread very rapidly," says Mr. Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute. "But bad things can spead just as rapidly, too. That leads me to believe that the coming struggle will be one between the spread of malign things versus trying to protect against them."

• This is the final installment in a four-part series. The previous stories ran Sept. 9, Sept. 30, and Nov. 18.

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