Network technology expands all sizes. It enables the biggest to become bigger and the smallest to become smaller. In the near future we can expect to see institutions larger than they have ever been, and smaller than they have ever been. For instance, a few banks will grow monstrously large at the same time that other banks shrink to the size of a smart card in a wallet and increase their numbers by millions. The middle expands, too. That hard-to-reach territory that once was well served by places is rejuvenated.

The space of network nodes and flows creates new social organizations, new forms of companies, in oddball sizes, and in unconventional arrangements. We are on the brink of entering a world where almost any shape of business is possible.

Silent movie buffs and meteorite collectors are quickly gathering on the net because the net’s space coheres them into a middle market, served at last by business and sales aimed directly at them. Egyptologists or cancer patients can create a mid-sized agora (neither insignificant nor huge) for ideas and knowledge. There was no place in mass markets for the niche communities of ethnic tribes or Klingon speakers, but the network economy constructs a space for them.

But mass broadcast TV and big print publishing are not going away. The chief advantage of peerage networks–that information flows in ripples through a web of equal nodes—is also the chief weakness of networks. Information can only advance by indirect osmosis, passing along like gossip. The web becomes a thicket of obstacles preventing simultaneous dissemination to all parts.

First, the plunging costs of information make it possible to find, then connect, two passions together far more efficiently than in the past. Once connected, cheap transactions keep the connection flourishing.

Second, symmetrical messaging, text, video, audio, 3D spaces, archives, privacy controls, all enhance the once slim attractions of a virtual community experience, keeping the community longer.

Third, the ubiquity of e-money in the network means that every niche has the ability to initiate an indigenous economy. The knowledge that dog breeders used to swap among themselves can become lucrative to the community as a whole when plugged into the network economy.

Fourth, the border-collapsing nature of the network economy means embryonic communities can theoretically draw upon a larger pool of potential members: all 6 billion humans. The law of increasing returns can feed a small interest into a mid-sized interest. Whereas once there was a lone fanatic for every notion, now there is a devoted web site for every fanatic notion; soon there can be 10,000 fellow enthusiasts for every fascination.

The hard middle is a pervasive problem. We have tools to access the ideas in one person’s book: its index and table of contents. We have tools to access the ideas of a library of millions of books: its card catalog. But we don’t have tools to access ideas in the hard middle, the region of expertise in 10,000 scholars, or 1,000 books. Where do you go for a listing of key words, key subjects, and key ideas for the complete literature about the U.S. Civil War?

Until recently, nowhere. Today, the symbol WWW immediately pops into our mind. We see in the World Wide Web the promise of creating a viable midlands. In this particular case the hyperlinking of all documents could be filtered and categorized to generate an index to middle-sized knowledge.

Services and goods for previously ingnored community — and town-sized groups, also known as the hard middle, can make economic sense with network technology.

The electronic space encourages middle communities. Unlike either broadcast or PC chips, a network fosters the energy that flows from the friend of a friend to the friend of a friend. Network architecture can find, cultivate, persuade, manage, and nourish intermediate-sized audiences and communities focused on common interests. Niche markets, in other words. Magazines, rooted in the postal system network, have served niche markets for a century. But the emerging broadband network offers many relationships the postal network (and magazines) could not: spontaneous reply, fully symmetrical bandwidth, true peerage communication, archives, filtering, community memory, etc.

Technology for mass production will remain. Technology to customize the personal will accelerate. But for the first time we have technology naturally suited for a size smaller than mass and greater than the self. We have a technology of net and web, stuffed with middleness.

Futurist Alvin Toffler says it best: “The era of mass society is over.” He ticks off the casualties: “No more mass production. No more mass consumption. No more mass education. No more mass democracy. No more weapons of mass destruction. No more mass entertainment.”

In its place: a world of demassified niches. Niche production, niche consumption, niche diversion, niche education. Niche world. Communities. Affinity groups. Clubs. Special Interest Groups. Clans. Subcultures. Tribes. Cults. (There is nothing utopian about this world.) Instead of the mass technology of broadcast TV, we now have net-centric alternatives.

But the vitality of places was weakened by a bifurcating pressure to make things either huge for the masses or solo for the personal. The logic of the modern was: it must appeal to everyone, or to only me. Neither mass society nor the cult of the personal was equipped to deal with the peculiar dynamics of the middle. There was little economic or technological support for aiming an innovation at 5,000 people. Neither broadcast nor the personal chip, for example, really knew how to do towns and neighborhoods.

During the industrial era, size was polarized to extremes. There was the “world,” or the masses, and there was “I.” Industrialization emphasized the large-scale efficiencies of mass production, which quickly led to mass consumption and mass society. A drift to the large, if not the largest, coursed through the society. If something was worth doing well, it was worth doing at the scale of the world. Ambitions ran to the tallest skyscraper, the biggest factory, the largest dam, the longest bridge. The technologies of communication of that age also flexed the muscle of big. The printed page and the radio signal–as central to the industrial age as anything made of iron–informed, educated, and mobilized hundreds of millions from a single transmission source. The power of big was never so nicely diagrammed as in the TV: a tiny spark amplified to reach billions of people over thousands of miles at once, in unison.

The “I” on the other hand was fed by mass advertising and the cult of the individual, which sprang up after the Second World War. A fascination with psychoanalysis, with the ego, with personal expression and self-esteem, culminated in the “Me decades” starting in the 1970s. The first bits of the information age fed this whetted appetite for further individualism. We got personal computers amid personal trainers, personal advisers, and expectations of everything personalized.