In last week's column I wrote: "The individualism that many of us were taught was axiomatic to being human was in fact generated by a print culture. Before the Gutenberg era, nobody thought that way. Digital culture undermines individualism and our ability to act as if we exist apart from our communities."

A reader wrote: "What about assessment in the age of mutuality? We may need to work as a group, but we are measured as individuals. As a collaborative writer I know plenty of horror stories about people misappropriating another's work and taking full credit."

That reader describes an inevitable tension as we try to catch an avalanche coming downhill. No matter how wide-eyed we think we are, things show up at the edges and catch us by surprise. Sound waves become visible on the wings of an airplane just before it breaks the sound barrier, McLuhan reminds us. To the blind, all things are sudden, and in some ways, we are all blind to the deeper implications of the digital revolution.

(1) In the middle of the clickstream, we see things now from this point of view, now from that. Our perception flickers back and forth like a holographic image.

Parallax is the apparent displacement of a single object seen from two different points of view. The "object" is human beings living in community in a digital world. From one point of view we are a collection of individuals with rights; from another, we are cells in a single body.

(2) Only as we engage with new technologies over time do they disclose to us the possibilities they make available. It is difficult to imagine today that when the telephone was invented it was not seen as a personal communication device. The telephone became a distributed medium that taught us how to use it and we became extensions of the system. When the movie camera was invented, it was set on a tripod in front of a proscenium arch. We used it to frame reality the way stage plays taught us to frame it. Over time the camera taught us how to move around, change focus, see through its lenses, and perceive reality differently.

We live in the meantime between different models of reality, straddling icebergs that are slowly drifting apart.

(3) When we read the translated words of sacred texts from only a couple thousand years ago, we assume they meant then what we mean by them now. They don't.

When Hebrews spoke of divine justice, for example, it was justice for an entire tribe. It was literally impossible to think of individuals separately from the community that provided the context for their identity.

Only after print was invented were the Reformation and Renaissance possible. Only then were individuals able to conceive of salvation or destiny as a private enterprise. Only then could they read scriptures to themselves and interpret its meaning privately, inaugurating a proliferation of religions and denominations.

(4) Ownership of literary property did not exist when the work was not fixed in text. An "author" did not have "rights" to a "work."

These columns are distributed on the Internet and published in print. In print form, fees are paid and the copyright is enforced. In digital form, it is hoped they will be replicated and distributed, but not published for gain by someone else.

Such is the new marketplace. Ubiquity => mind share => brand equity => sales. We give away products for free, as the Grateful Dead invited fans to record concerts, creating a bootleg market that broadened the context for their tours.

The "rights" of "authors" to their "work" are in flux.

(5) When we work collaboratively on-line, ownership is blurred, and so are the boundaries around the selves that create the work. It's like an exploration of paranormal phenomena. Once we discover telepathy or clairvoyance to be possible, the "self" having the experience begins to lose its boundaries or definition in something bigger. If reincarnation is real, the self that persists cannot be the "little self" that pops at the moment of death like a soap bubble.

(6) A recent Wall Street Journal article on self-governing work teams spoke of how hard it is for some workers to accept responsibility ("accountability") or hear the feedback that is necessary for teams to function. Ralph Stayer of Johnsonville Foods in Kohler, Wisconsin, reports that among the painful casualties of the perilous journey toward self-governing work teams were executives who could not morph from command-and-control generals into real coaches.

A professor at Carnegie Mellon estimates that such teams have been adopted by 40% of US manufacturers. Rumors of the demise of hierarchical structures, however, are greatly exaggerated. Hierarchy conserves energy and eliminates role confusion. The initial impact of the digital revolution is a flattening and broadening of horizontal structures but those branches grow on taller trees. Hierarchical structures are replicated fractal-like on a larger scale.

(7) During epiphanies -- moments of revelation -- we see that all of our cultural assumptions about identity and community are "consensual hallucinations" like cyberspace itself.

A friend recently recounted a vision he had years ago. He saw the whole earth as a large sphere, millions of lines radiating from its center until they became -- when they arrived at the surface -- millions of tiny patches of land. On every patch was a minuscule person proclaiming, "I own this land. It's mine."

My friend, of course, as do we all, still flickers back and forth between paradigms. His safety deposit box holds deeds to "land" that he "owns" AND he will never forget that, underlying that arbitrary abstraction, we belong to the earth, rather than vice versa.

Our descriptions of reality are true at different degrees of precision. The streams of our truths are continuous, like the flow of the strands of a fractal, and replicate at all levels.

We work in groups but measure ourselves as individuals. We need one another without qualification to create the community in which our individuality is fulfilled, but we act as if we are independent isolates. The truth is not just one thing, ever. Our minds make up the maze of distinctions through which we make our various ways until -- suddenly -- the walls explode and we find ourselves in a midnight garden, "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

Nodes of a network, individuals interlaced with their glowing monitors, luminous leaves of a single tree.

September 26 1997