The 19th century Spanish philosopher Francisco Goya, better
known as the great painter, once wrote "The sleep of reason
breeds monsters". In our own time, with the explosion of new
communications technologies, are these technologies perhaps
breeding new monsters right before our eyes? Of course, the new
technology is the product of reason. But is it a reason that is
awake in the real sense of the word - in other words, attentive,
vigilant, and stubbornly critical? Or is it dozing and half
asleep? And does it, at the moment of creating and imagining, go
off the rails and ends by creating and imagining monsters? At
the end of the 19th century, when the railways were becoming a
new means of communication, the doom-mongers denounced the
railway engine and claimed people would die of asphyxiation in
the tunnels. They maintained that at speeds higher than 50 km an
hour, blood would start spurting from people’s ears and noses
and horrible convulsions would lead to death. These were the
professional pessimists who al