Public Listservant
Having made the world safe for streaming media as a senior VP at RealNetworks, Maria Cantwell is back in the political game and hoping to conquer the digital divide. A six-year veteran of the Washington state legislature, Cantwell jumped to the House in 1992, repping the "Microsoft District"; she fought the good fight in the crypto and Clipper Chip wars but was swept into the private sector by the '94 GOP landslide. Now armed with an appropriately Net-savvy campaign, she's a leading contender in September's Democratic race to face US Senator Slade Gorton. The most small-d democratic feature of her site (www.cantwell2000.com) is the Discussion list - a freewheeling forum where people can (and do) post opinions contrary to Cantwell's own. "My listserv isn't a place where we only talk about certain subjects," says Cantwell. "That wouldn't hold the interest or inspire the faith that this generation needs to have in politics."
Stud Finder
When Sharon Pommer was a fashion buyer at Macy's a decade ago, she kept up with teen fashion by hanging out at the mall. These days, the VP and general merchandise manager for teen portal Alloy Online (www.alloy.com) does much of her fashion research online, keeping tabs on what's in and what's getting flamed. Alloy sends out more than 35 million print catalogs a year, and the site has become a hot destination for teens (not to mention etailers: first-quarter revenues tripled since last year); in turn, Alloy.com's 1.3 million unique visitors a month drive Pommer's buying decisions. So what's hot for back-to-school? "Studs and rhinestones," she says. "They're going to add a little glam to the denim look."
Eye Max
The latest digital projection device isn't at the local multiplex - it's coming soon to a pair of eyeballs near you. The Virtual Retinal Display, brought to you by Thomas Furness, founder of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington (www.hitl.washington.edu), is a pair of goggles that projects a harmless photon beam onto the retina. The device "paints"a video signal on the eye, superimposing the image over the real-world surface. Recently, neurosurgeons at Kettering Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, used the Microvision-licensed device to help them see precisely where to insert screws during a spinal operation. The VRD has also shown promise in pain therapy, distracting, for example, burn patients by creating imaginary worlds. Says Furness, "I want to use technology so that healing has to do with people's thinking, not just pharmaceuticals."
X-Factor
British cyberfeminist Sadie Plant has always aimed to upset the status quo. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture, written while Plant was a research fellow at the University of Warwick, weaves the argument that cyber- revolution is the historical result of "women's work," not men's penetrating insight. Now, with the US publication of Writing on Drugs, Plant has added mind-altering substances to her litany of chaos agents. Every era, says Plant, gets the drug it deserves: In the 19th century, opium soothed a culture traumatized by industrialization; at the dawn of the 21st century, ecstasy speaks to a generation exploring virtual space and stretched time online. "It was only with the introduction of digital technologies," Plant explains, "that ecstasy really found its dancing feet."
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