Next: The Future Just Happened By Michael Lewis 192 pages, $23 W.W. Norton & Company

If you could have collected all the energy -- all the mania and frenzied hyperbole -- emitted by the tens of thousands of men and women who were business journalists during the Internet boom, you might have illuminated the whole era with it.

Instead, what's left? Fading Industry Standard party invitations jumbled with "Clinton-Gore in '96" buttons at the backs of drawers. Moldering stacks of Business 2.0 in garages across America. Maybe a Guinness World Records listing for Red Herring's June 2000 issue as the heaviest -- and most ad-bloated -- business magazine in history.

It's a crying shame when the age, with its Nasdaq-inspired leaps and falls, needed its own Dickens or Zola. Furthermore, now that the bubble has burst, the journalistic consensus seems to be that, since the Internet's profit-making potentials were overrated, its social consequences were as well. Even though a little thought indicates that nothing is more unlikely than that, most reporters are neither worrying nor writing about the Internet's impact on society.

To be sure, documenting the Internet's social effects is a tall order for a writer. A writer would not only have to understand technology and Wall Street, but also would need to look at the forces the Internet has set loose. Putting it another way, that writer would have to do what Michael Lewis says he did in Next: The Future Just Happened: "I stopped worrying over the social consequences of the Internet and began simply to watch what was actually happening on the Internet. Inadvertently, it was telling us what we wanted to become."

Let's not beat around the bush. As of Next, Mr. Lewis is not just an antidote to the journalistic herd, but also good enough to do for our era what, say, Tom Wolfe did for the '60s. If it makes other writers feel better, Mr. Lewis has had some help this time. Though one person he interviews in his book, a 15-year-old in New Jersey who was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission after he made $800,000 trading online, has received a fair amount of publicity, most of the folks in Next were found by a posse of surfers organized by the British Broadcasting Corporation to locate individual examples of the Internet's social effects for a forthcoming TV series (with Mr. Lewis presiding).

KID STUFF What's striking is how many of these individual examples of people transformed by the Internet are kids in such unlikely places as New Jersey or South-Central Los Angeles -- in the case of an immigrant 15-year-old from Belize who established himself as a legal adviser online -- or else grimy working-class Manchester, England -- like the 14-year-old peer-to-peer software expert. Then, even when they're not kids, the people Next turns up are unlikely types, like a band of has-been rural English rockers called Marillion who have created a second career through the Internet and proudly sport the logo, as Mr. Lewis reports, "Marillion -- Uncool as F*@k."

So what's it all mean?

Of course, nobody knows yet. But the last technological change that affected most peoples' consciousness this same way was probably color TV. After that, we learned to hide new technologies behind graphical user interfaces or beneath the hoods of our cars; simultaneously, we elected politicians who talked as if the world was essentially the same as the one our parents grew up in. Now, however, the networking capabilities of information technologies allow genuinely new social possibilities. Naturally, some people -- kids, especially -- are grabbing them.

Consider, for example, the European teenager who cracked the content scrambling system on DVDs so he and his buddies could play them on computers running Linux. Or contemplate the open source movement itself: it shouldn't escape anybody's attention that the arguments advanced by economists since Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) that the self-organizing, efficiency-creating, evolutionary tendencies of free markets could apply in spades to networks operating on the open source model, thereby giving some folks a handy way to dispense with corporate structures, business models, and the suits who espouse them. So nobody knows yet what it all means, but read Next and get some clues.

Longtime contributor Mark Williams is a freelance writer who lives in Oakland, California. Write to markred@pacbell.net.