Pac Bell says, "The Information Superhighway - it's real California." Interactive TV makes the same claim. As does nearly every online service. As do cellular phone providers. As a result, the term "information superhighway" has lost its original meaning and become a catch-phrase for data merchants to use to give themselves an air of being cutting edge.
No such enterprise can resist making some reference to the Information Superhighway. What a gaffe in marketing that would be, the absense of such slogan would make them seem out of touch. Instead these firms throw the phrase around as an abstraction, redefining it at every mention to suit their own economic world.
The original metaphor behind "information superhighway" was apt. It explained a national, comprehensive infrastructure similar to interstate highways. The function of a highway is to efficiently transport people from one place to another. An information highway would, similarly, efficiently transport people from one place to another, but instead of transmitting people physically, it would transmit their essence: their data. The technology is here: fiber-optic cables, satellite links, cellular towers, all of which could be combined in a fashion to link anyone to anyone else efficiently and for free.
Cost is another facet of the metaphor. Highways are publically funded and therefore extremely pluralistic, as opposed to a pay-as-you-go type system. Furthermore, highways reach out and connect places that might otherwise have been unconnected, such as rural areas. Instead, everybody everywhere has a chance to get on. The major stumbling block is that building the infrastructure, the network necessary to provide data highways, is expensive. The project has been delayed while the question of who will fund the network gets resolved. The metaphor implies the federal government would build it, as it had built the interstates years before. But its large cost has caused fiscally-tight politicians to look elsewhere, to private companies, which brings the logic back to the original phenomenon.
Individual companies are, in fact, building their own networks. Pac Bell has its own programs, many cable companies have theirs. RCA has a satellite network, and then there's also America OnLine and its ilk. And they promote their programs under the guise of the "Information Superhighway," a slogan which couldn't be more inaccurate. Individual networks do not alone create a national infrastructure. Pac Bell and cable companies build theirs where there is a sizable market. There is no way for these hodge-podge, unstandardized networks to reach out and tie together all of America. Also, most of these networks like America OnLine are pay-as-you-go systems. This practice eliminates any comparison with the universal access that the interstate highways allow.
On the other hand, the various new technologies are exciting, they may be profitable, and they may actually, ultimately, somehow, improve life for all Americans. The problem is that by using the "Information Superhighway" as a slogan by anyone who wants it as a marketing tool, it further gets away from the original intent and provisions of the words, and thus there can not be a wholesale change in the national information landscape.
c. 1995, 1999 Cathy Gellis
cathyg@csua.berkeley.edu
www.csua.berkeley.edu/~cathyg
Blog: www.cathygellis.com