ately 55 million active internet participants around the globe, with the larger numbers located in the United States and Western Europe. Many people do not realize the ultimate social, intellectual, and economic losses incurred by nonusers and, by extension, the societies in which they participate. Just as important, the consequences of this digital mobility go generally unaddressed.
             Governments and societies become functional for a variety of reasons, not the least of which revolves around the acquisition of power and the influence that power wields over others. The past decade, the development of the internet and the amount of complex and accessible information available there has produced a new definition of power: control of globally applicable information. In the modern era, it must be argued that those who control information and the technology to retrieve it have control over those who seek information. A culture, whose predominant resource is information, is then driven solely by various information agencies and agents. For those in control of these agencies, information can be parceled out, its interpretation orchestrated, even withheld, to the aggrandizement of the power brokers and the detriment of their subordinates. Thus, a small number of unscrupulous individuals are potentially able manage an entire culture simply by granting selective access to specific information, whether political, environmental, scientific, or social because they control the technology that supports the access processes. The resulting society would be structured in a bottom-heavy design. A small percentage of people exist at the top as the information brokers, and a very large percentage of people below them are under their control. As a culture becomes more dependent upon technology, it also becomes vulnerable to those who use technology skillfully. A parallel comparison can be drawn against this modern interpretation of power when we v...