Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I want to say that I have adored this book so far (currently only half-way through, but will hopefully finish by class on Monday). I've always been a sucker for near-future Sci-Fi novels and short stories because it's so much easier for me to imagine the changes they envision taking place, and that makes it possible to view modern society through the lens of the authors and hypothesize about the effects such technology would have.
Before I even started reading Rainbows End, what I knew of the story made me think of Neal Stephenson's Sci-Fi masterpiece (in my opinion, at least), Snow Crash. Like Vinge, Stephenson uses his novel to imagine how technology will shape early 21st century America, and there are great differences between the two worlds the authors create.
The most significant technology in Stephenson's future America is the Metaverse, a virtual successor to the internet and paramount to social interactions in the 21st century. The Metaverse is a collective online virtual reality that can be accessed by everyone, through either public terminals or personal goggle displays and terminals. Users implement virtual models (avatars) to represent themselves in this 3D world, and it is nearly infinitely moddable by users. In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is used to communicate with friends, attend business meetings, and duel warriors from the other side of the world. Second Life was released seven years after the publication of Snow Crash and is the best modern-day analogy to Stephenson's Metaverse.
Vinge has the benefit of writing his novel fourteen years after the first publication of Snow Crash (2006 and 1992, respectively). Not surprisingly, his vision of the future incorporates augmented reality over virtual reality, which seems to correspond with the declining interest in augmented reality through the 2000's. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/augmented-reality-vs-virtual-reality/). Augmented reality is much more practical (in that it primarily serves as a means to transfer information) and relevant to human experience (in that it incorporates the context of the user's environment) than virtual reality. Similar to the VR goggles worn by some of Stephenson's characters, the characters in Rainbows End 'wear' smart clothing and contact lenses that allow them to always be connected to the rest of the world. Again, Vinge's vision of the future is more practical than Stephenson's because of the relative innocuous nature of clothing, compared to the heavy goggles and terminals that the 'Gargoyles' (so named for their grotesque appearance) of Snow Crash must wear to maintain that persistent connection.
The technology in Vinge's Rainbows End also carries with it a burden of learning. This learning barrier is one of the main ways that the younger generation in the novel is separate from the older generation. The younger generation (mainly Juan and Miri) have grown up using augmented reality and are much more proficient at it than the older generation (Robert and Xiu), but the older generation has skills that seem to be virtually nonexistent in the youth, such as writing. Robert refers to Juan as being 'paraliterate' because of his finesse with Epiphany (AR) technology and his ignorance of the art of writing
The near-disappearance of books in Rainbows End suggests a generation that is largely illiterate in the traditional sense, though after wondering how AR data is relayed to users, text still seems to be the fastest and most convenient form for information to take, so this generation must still be capable of reading. Additionally, information still requires a certain level of understanding to make use of it, so its not fair or accurate to say that the younger generation in Rainbows End is comprised of stupid literates. They are merely the products of having grown up in a world of digital, AR literacy, and unsurprisingly, their text literacy has probably suffered to a degree.
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