Harmony…on an expanding net

ecentpublic relations hype from the telecommunications sector and other highly-centralised media enteprises paints a$ture of irideo-on-demand: 500-channel television, and vastly extended opportunities for interactive home shopping. This is open described LB a fortbcom-ing 'Information Superhighway:. . but the more appropriate real-world model is a railroad: Monopoly ownership of the separate transport systems, local hardware standard, and quorum determined scheduling for efficient operation. There's a growing consensus, however, among those who are looking most thoughtlily at what's happening, that such visions of forthcoming centrally-oriented multimedia-delivery empires are going to be left in the digital dust of the much more feral developments already taking place around the Internet and associated subscription networks. A diverse 'Virtual Community' is beginning to form which bears much more similarity to that road transport metaphor; right down to electronic country lanes leading to rural telecottages.1 Increasing numbers of individuals, educational bodies, and businesses of all sizes are being attracted to this existing 'network of net-works' as a means of relating directly with each other, rather than having to depend on the services of a few principal mass-media purveyors. Not that centralised interactive resource 'data-bases' won't be readily available through whatever the Internet evolves into during the next decade. Just that the real driving force of the whole thing is clearly going to be a range of essentially new modes of communication between people. What we now know as the Internet has evolved from the US Defence Department's ARPANet, a computer communications network that was specifically designed to survive a nuclear war-through having a working structure that is inherently decentralised. In short, it was made to be as autonomous and 'hard to kill' as possible. This military network was first extended to the American university research community, with increasing levels of support from the NSF, then naturally spread to other countries and is now rapidly extending out into the commercial sector. Due to its dispersed nature, it is difficult to even keep track of exactly what's happening on 'the Net'. The nonprofit Internet Society has now assumed responsibility for setting the 'rules of the road' for Internet traffic. They provide a much needed forum for maintaining and evolving basic standards, but take no direct part in defining what sorts of things are actually happening on the Internet, nor the kinds of interactive tools available to its users. The Net has taken on a life of its own and …