If you'll read to the last paragraph, you'll find Gibson's very profound conclusion: that the 1996 Web was the early "test pattern" for what he predicts will be a world-changing, but "less fun" medium. How right he was.
Even with all the order that we've consented to have imposed by various hubs over the past 17 years, it inspires a certain swell of optimism for me to consider that we've never really abandoned that spirit. The frontier may be long settled and built up, but YouTube, Tumblr, Imgur, and other gated communities still play host to the kind of spectacularly diverse, ham-radio aesthetic of 1996. And there are still frontier sites. Cult webcomics, improbable enthusiast projects, random artifacts of odd genius.
I hope we never lose this spirit, and given the past two decades of the web, I don't think we need to worry.
We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html
"With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
A special property of all social extensions of the body is that they return to plague the inventors in a kind of agenbite of outwit. As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves."
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...