"A community is not a community of disembodied spoken statements, in part because the most important aspect of the communication that people have is emotional, and one often communicates emotion not in terms of the text but as a subtext. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn't a footnote. Too many computer scientists don't understand this."

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide.

He is the author of Mirror Worlds, The Muse in the Machine, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, Machine Beauty, and Drawiing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

Further reading on Edge:

Dream-Logic, The Internet, and Artificial Thought [7.8.10]
Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously By David Gelernter [3.10.10]
The Edge Annual Question 2010: "How Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think?" [1.10.10]
Lord of the Cloud: John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter [4.25.09]
Streams [12.4.01]
"The Second Coming — A Manifesto [6.15.00]
"The Conservative — David Gelernter" in Digerati [1996]