Background

Some background documents for thinking about computers, the web, etc...

from William J. Mitchell's City of Bits (MIT Press 1995)
Any time I go looking for specific things on the web I find other stuff by accident. And it was thus that I happened upon a site for an electronic accompaniment to City of Bits, which I'd just started to read in conventional paper. The quote above is what started the quest --I used AltaVista to search for the string 'Vitruvian man'. Serendipity did the rest.
I think if I had it to do over again I'd choose this book instead of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead.
Another possibility, which also seems to have a cyberversion, is Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, which I haven't read.
Vannevar Bush's As We May Think [1946! --and, for my money, one of the most interesting and prophetic documents of the last 50 years]

On Participatory Networks

Netizens: an anthology by Michael and Ronda Hauben, and a hypertext version too
The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold (chapter 3: "Visionaries and Convergences: the Accidental History of the Net"). You might find the Introduction to the book interesting too.

Where have we been? Where are we going?

"The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" (Alan Kay)
A Net Gain (James Crawley, in the San Diego Union-Tribune)
EEF's (Extended) Guide to the Internet (1994 --and dated in some areas, but that means a handy way to gain perspective on how very rapidly this realm evolves)
Emergence on the Web (Selena Sol)

The lexicon of the cyber realm is fascinating: its rapid growth, arcane acronyms, peculiar locutions, cutesy metaphors... No paper-medium source can keep up with the growth of this branch of the language, but there are interesting electronic compendia like

The Jargon File (a.k.a. "The Hacker's Dictionary")
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing ('ever-expanding' and keyword-searchable)

Definitions for spam and weenie will give you something of the flavor. The web indexes like AltaVista are also an interesting way to approach the lexicon(s) --some 3000 occurrences of the word 'spamming', for example (clearly explained in this passage).

And here's one hot off the (electronic) press: a column from the weekly InfoWorld (a trade publication, full of news on various things of interest to corporate computer folk) about the use of Netscape's 'cookie' file to monitor demographics for advertisers. I also found a remarkably clear (and slightly technical) article on cookies in Netscapeworld, an electronic journal.

If you find electronic journals intriguing you might want to browse W&L's portal into that realm.