¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Going by the business stories you read these days, you could be forgiven
for thinking that the news won’t be coming on paper for much longer. When
you can have video-on-demand, 500-channel interactive TV, your own custom-designed
electronic newspaper culled from daily bulletins around the globe, and hand-held
gizmos that manage your phone calls, faxes and electronic mail, who’ll need
the printed word?

With high-capacity telecoms links now spanning the world, data networks
are spreading faster than pimples in a pizza parlour. Vice-President Al
Gore is stirring his fellow Americans into a frenzy with talk about the
‘information superhighway’ that will make America great again in the 21st
century. Medicine, education and science will be its beneficiaries, he says.

One phone company has an ad on American TV that talks about ‘a highway
that you can’t see, that links everyone, that goes everywhere’. And almost
every US company whose business is telecoms, computers, TV or cable is trying
to buy or merge with another one. And it’s not to give them an excuse to
rethink their corporate logo. They’re preparing to make the most of the
coming revolution.

So, if you’ve never used the Internet, if you haven’t tried a CD-ROM,
if you reckon video-conferencing and telecommuting are strictly for technofreaks,
then think again. The future will belong to those who are at ease with the
Net – the technologies by which someone in San Francisco or Szechwan can
converse with one, a hundred or a hundred million people at once. Navigating
the network will become something you do to find a job, to contact friends,
to plot your life.

Attached to the Net, you will be able to work from home, and work for
many different employers at once in a world where white-collar jobs will
increasingly be part time and task-oriented, rather than full time and described
by a title. Businesses will need the best information, and that means links
to the Net.

When the best jobs aren’t advertised you have to be in touch with the
right people to be considered. The place to make the right contacts – an
activity long known as ‘networking’ – will be the Net. In Britain, there
are jobs ‘posted’ on the CIX bulletin board – electronic small ads that
never get onto paper. The trend can only grow stronger. Businesses too will
be using global networks more and more to search for background data, to
talk to customers and contacts, and to link office to office and computer
to computer.

In Europe, the pressure for deregulation is growing as telecommunications
companies squeeze more data down a line, effectively expanding its bandwidth,
and the links themselves become cheaper. Andrew Grove, president of the
world’s biggest chip maker, Intel, expects that just as IBM-compatible PCs
became a commodity in the 1980s, so will bandwidth in the 1990s.

And what will the digital superhighway look like? Boring, actually:
a piece of cable linking the terminals (or nodes, as they’re known in networkers’
argot), which could be personal computers, or transmitters/receivers on
top of your TV set, or the TV sets themselves, or intelligent pagers, or
whatever. And, somewhere in the middle, computers controlling all the data
flowing around. The whole decentralised system will be controlled by a
set of protocols that will allow one node on the network to communicate
with any other.

One of the superhighway’s greatest advantages will be its bandwidth.
At present, the twin copper wires that provide a single domestic phone line
can carry several hundred thousand bits of data per second over a few kilometres;
a future one, using fibre optic technology, could handle thousands of times
as much – enough for digital TV, computer video, a link to a database and
a telephone call all at once. And because it will be a two-way link, you’ll
be telling the TV station if you don’t like what’s on.

This two-way, ‘interactive’ communication is what Rick Tompane, a co-founder
of the games machine company 3DO, thinks is the real benefit of the superhighway.
‘Interactivity is the medium of doing. You learn by doing.’ If schools can
buy systems that can deliver experiences to everyone, he says: ‘You can
revolutionise education. I see that as a longer-term benefit to the marketplace.’

And it won’t just be schools that benefit. Hospitals will send X-ray
pictures and CAT scans to specialists elsewhere, who will confer online
with doctors on the spot to make an instant diagnosis. Distances won’t matter.
¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs and engineers can already dial into supercomputers on another
continent to run their mathematical models or test out their designs in
greater detail. Stockbrokers can assess the performances of other exchanges
in other countries with a link into a world of virtual reality stock that
is rising or falling about them. Strap yourself in for liftoff.

It’s all honourable, worthy, improving stuff . . . but there are people
with different ideas about what the superhighway will carry. ‘Imagine the
dreams people had in the 1950s for TV – about how it would make images from
all over the world available to you where you sat,’ says Kristina Woolsey,
one of Apple Computer’s ‘distinguished’ scientists. There were even hopes
that TV would be a great educational tool.

Now look again. Images from the world? News from Bosnia may be watched
by the concerned few, but most of us prefer to watch something less distressing,
more entertaining – and it’s only a button-press away. And education? Ask
any parent how much their child ‘learns’ from TV. Game over.

Nintendo and Sega, the Japanese electronic games goliaths, have no doubt
that they are heading for another good spell. ‘How much time on the superhighway
do you really think is going to be people looking at the Dow-Jones, and
how much on entertainment?’ asks Russell Braun, Nintendo’s engineering manager
at the company’s US headquarters in Richmond in Washington state.

What the games merchants want is high-definition TV with four times
the resolution of today’s standard sets. Games played on these screens will
take you to any virtual world the programmers’ imaginations can conjure
up. Better yet, they’ll be digital, so a computer can control them. ‘2007
is going to be an important year: the estimates say that’s when 40 per cent
of the US population will have HDTV,’ says Braun. ‘Before that, you won’t
really get revolutionary change.’ TV is seen as a key medium. Put it on
a TV screen, the thinking goes, and it will sell.

Tompane from 3DO says the first big use will be video-on-demand – downloading
any film you like, when you like, over a phone line. ‘That’s estimated to
be a $15 billion industry. Then there’s $7 billion spent in arcades. Then
there’s $4 billion on games.

To many in the related businesses of entertainment, TV and computing,
the revolution promises to be a licence to print money. (And file this,
too: where large amounts of money change hands, crime tends to follow quickly.)
But for now there only are promises and ideas. In the hope of riches to
come, big bucks are going to be invested and lost – of that we can be certain.
Beyond that, no one can say for sure what the future will look like; just
that it will be digital.

In this confusing time, many American companies are looking to Joe Sixpack,
the archetypal, stereotypical TV consumer, to pull them through by taking
up everything they can throw at him at the right price. ‘But remember,’
warns Braun, ‘Joe Sixpack doesn’t necessarily want to interact with his
°Õ³Õ.’

Donald Norman, an Apple fellow, is equally downbeat: ‘I don’t think
people will want to change their lifestyles that much. Most people don’t
want to search for information. They prefer doing physical things – playing
sports, going places. That conflicts with this thinking that we will do
more home shopping from the comfort of our couches. No, I think people will
use interactive media mostly for electronic mail.’

Entertainment and mail. It conjures up a world where children will use
the Net to contact their peers across the globe, and breathlessly type the
questions they need answered. Not ‘Tell me about your culture and the honoured
authors of your constitution’, but ‘How do you pass the Evil Keyholder on
level 5 of Big Stinky Robots?’

There will still be life outside the Net, untouched by technology. But
the Internet and its outgrowths will carve new divisions. For those on the
Net there will be information, entertainment, work and even companionship
on tap. For anyone not woven into its web, life promises low expectations,
low pay and very possibly loneliness too. There’ll be no hitchhiking on
the information superhighway.