g-in." Since the word cyberspace was first used, there have been other names given to that shadowy space where computer data reside: the Net, the Web, the Cloud, the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Datasphere, the Electronic Frontier, the Infobahn or I-Bahn, and the information superhighway. For working reporters, cyber has become the prefix of the day, and they are spawning neologisms as fast as they can type: cyberphilia, cyberphobia, cyberwonk, and cybersex.
The information superhighway is not without precedent. In 1971, for example, it was generally agreed that cable technology, in concert with other technologies, would bring a communications revolution. In 1972, a book called "The Wired Nation" urged cable to become an electronic communications highway and, by the '80s, there were predictions about learning at home, electronic mail (E-mail), and scanning far-off libraries in search of information. The lesson ought to be plain; technology does not a communications revolution make. Economics will trump technology most of the time as people must be offered things they want at prices they can afford. Moreover, admission to the superhighway will be, for many, a lifestyle change: "The notion that people who spend dozens of hours watching sitcoms every week and never read a newspaper will somehow be transformed into Renaissance men and women by the availability of new information services in the home seems overly hopeful, to say the least" (Gomery 10).
The technological force today is convergence. Television, movies, radio, newspapers, books and data have all in the past been composed in different media- on paper or film or magnetic tape. Today, all can be reduced to a single form of information, which is the common language of the computer's binary code, an endless string of ones and zeroes. The real economic, political and technological question today is how best to deliver all this information. Unlike asphalt highways built by the go...