. You'd be able to hook up to the network through your computer, interactive TV, telephone, or some future device that somehow combines the attributes of all three. Even wireless gadgets such as pagers, future versions of cellular phones, and newfangled "personal digital assistants" would be able to tap into the highway. The purpose: to provide remote electronic banking, schooling, shopping, taxpaying, chatting, game playing, videoconferencing, movie ordering, medical diagnosing...the list goes on.
The name being used for this information system has been denigrated by many. The analogy with a superhighway derives from
Vice President Al Gore who started using the term when he was a senator. He now serves as the administration's point man on technology and so has spread the term more widely:
The comparison isn't without merit: Like transportation networks, communications work best if they connect everybody, conform to the same standards everywhere, and minimize bottlenecks all things the information highway is supposed to accomplish. Moreover, the construction of the interstate highway systems in the second half of this century forever altered American society. . .
Society has already been changed by the more rapid spread of technology seen in the last two decades with the advent of the personal computer and with the success of the videocassette and cable television. Many see a future which will combine these technologies in the information superhighway:
In one rosy scenario after another we are tantalized with visions of access to every library in the cosmos, to internationally respected teachers; we are told to envision remote Third World villagers getting their CAT scans instantly analyzed by worldclass doctors. This breathtaking range of possibilities is ours, we are told, when these networks of coaxial cable and fiber optics, built by private enterprise, are installed over the next ten to twenty years. This n...