Home is the place to be born, to leave after adolescence to establish one's own, to raise a family, receive guests, celebrate the events of life, and die. At home you live a life outside work or school. With disrespect to nuances of cultural emancipation in individual and communal life, a basic notion of home as Bachelard appreciates it, lives on today. Of course home was - to use Vilém Flusser's words - `pierced', like its dwellings were, by public facilities as the sewer system, gas and electricity and later telephone, television, networks of communication. Home didn't shelter us from these facilities, nor can it serve anymore to `process noise into information' (a quality that Flusser distinguished for it) vis-à-vis the growing complexity and mere quantity of communication media. `The whole house became a ruin, and through the cracks blows the wind of communication': Flusser concludes that we have become `homeless', to such an extent that conventional architecture is not going to be very helpful, merely filling the gaps between the private and the public. (Vilém Flusser, Haüser bauen 1989, in `Von der Freiheit des Migranten' 1994).

John Berger, in `And our faces, my heart, brief as photos' (1984), formulates that (to certain underprivileged) `...home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice, or by a set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. At its most brutal, home is no more than one's name...' And also: `Today, as soon as very early childhood is over, the house can never again be home, as it was in other epochs. This century, for all its wealth and with all its communication systems, is the century of banishment.'

Wouldn't we all then, since childhood, be underprivileged - banished to communication media? Through which we are relentlessly reminded of the nostalgia of home, space and place, by metaphors of location and navigation? To remember home when it was more than our name, remember the intimacy that we were surrounded by in the presence of tangible togetherness, to remember a hallway, a kitchen, an attic, a study, a garden, the way different seasons coloured and flavoured the home differently, the coming and going of guests?

But what if home would be `no more than our name': a string of `pretty good protected' code; will we have hunting-gathering agents, operating this name for us to assemble home-on-demand? A `set of practices' could surely include an information practice. Will home-on-demand be constituted from the information practices of well-raised knowbots, navigating cyberscape under the flag of radical customization? Will home shift from hardware to software, to better fit our (dis-)abilities as information processors and guide us towards the development of a genuine information habit?

Old habits die hard, and so do their metaphors. Any interaction, whether with another person, a space or a body of information, is mediated by the symbolic orders that we navigate by. We communicate by maps of communication. One `set of practices' is mapped as home, another as work, yet another as school, as love, as family. The cultivation of these maps of an Information Habit that houses our most intimate memories, plans and relations, is the most serious commitment for an information age - it is the conditio sine qua non of information culture and prosperity.

Communication media pierce our dwellings to facilitate the settling of home in information technology. The poetics and politics of home in the age of information will equally guide the architecture of built and electronic space. The memory of architecture will model electronic space to the same extent as the hot links of new media will model different buildings. Thus a new set of practices, which will be known as our information habit, will come into being.