If you are, as I am, interested in some of the philosophical implications of these developments, the World-Wide Web is the perfect place to begin your exploration. The Web now is replete with fine resources in the field of what some call "cyber-philosophy."
The perfect place to begin your exploration is at the University of Iowa Libraries Gateway to the Internet site. The creators of the Iowa site have assembled an extraordinary collection of links to materials of interest to students of "cyber-philosophy" called Hypertext, Cybernetics, Cyborgs, and Virtual Realities. Here, you can explore very thorough and well-maintained lists of links related to such topics as: Hypertext Theory; Gender and Cyberspace; Virtual Realities; and profiles of Theorists and Personalities such as Vannevar Bush, whose 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think," is often credited with inventing the concept of hypertext; and the "socialist-feminist" Donna Haraway, represented with a link to her 1983 essay "The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit."
The Iowa site will take you to such resources as the Principia Cybernetica Web in Belgium, whose credo reads: "We hold that in our time, the age of information, it is systems science and cybernetics, as the general sciences of organization and communication, that can provide the basis for contemporary philosophy." Or the Chaos Metalink, devoted to Chaos Science, nonlinearity, and "things fractal," including some interesting links to Shockwave-playable works of "fractal music." Or N. Katherine Hayles' "Hypertext Hamlet", which explores the changes that computer-age technologies are bringing to literary studies: "When literature takes shape in a computer, a startlingly different aesthetic can emerge."
All in all, the University of Iowa site has something to feed almost every interest. There are pages devoted to theories of Digital Communities, Technology and Postmodernism, and Cyborgs. There is even a backward glance at Henry Adams, who, in his The Education of Henry Adams tells us in a chapter called "The Dynamo and the Virgin" that at the World Exposition in Paris in 1900 he stood in awe of the great, new electric dynamos on exhibit as "symbols of infinity." One wonders what Adams would have remarked about cyborgs or virtual reality.
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