The term "Information Revolution" is a misnomer.

All who want to succeed in this new environment must stop thinking of networks and digital technologies as media for managing information and start thinking of them as media to manage relationships.

To say that the Internet is about "information" is a bit like saying that "cooking" is about oven temperatures; it's technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.

While it is true that digital technologies have completely transformed the world of information into readily manipulable bits and bytes, it is equally true that the genuine significance of these technologies isn't rooted in the information they process and store.

A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations.

Gutenberg's technology wasn't merely about producing compendia of information. It was about transforming traditional relationships between the People, their Church and the State. Five centuries later, the point endures: When it comes to the impact of new media, the importance of information is subordinate to the importance of community.

New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people. That is the essential tension of the revolution taking place.

The irony of our so-called Information Age: Information itself offers value only when presented in the context of particular relationships.

New technologies push and test the meaning of concepts like relationship, community and interpersonal expression.