Subject: For Users, "Information Highway" is a Bad Metaphor
From: MASOUDER@alex.stkate.edu
Always There
Now, think of the "information highway" from the user's prespective. For this purpose we'll use the Internet as the highway. We turn on some digit manipulation device - perhaps this digital notebook computer on which I'm currently typing. We call up some serverthing and we're on the Internet (or so they tell us). We type the word "gopher" (or click a picture of a rodent) and a couple of seconds later we stare at choice delivered to our "desktop". We pick the item we want to look at--the Twin Cities weather. CLICK, CLICK, Whirr... we are reading the weather. We click into mosaic and--shazam!--there it is. We look at options in file servers all over the world and we never have to wait for more than a few seconds. (If, occasionally, we wait any longer we think the whole freaking network is broken down). We are always where we want to be. Or, more accuarately, where we want to be is always "here". We are almost never travelling.
For the user the "information highway" metaphor breaks down. Being ON the information highway is not at all like being on the actual rubber-meets-the-road highway. Not at all. No wonder why the public is so confused.
The great datafuture promised to us is also confusing. Videos on demand that the phone company wants to offer sound like a virtual Dominos pizza delivery service but not any kind of highway. Banking/shopping/telecommuting sound like the products of an information spigot. But no one is sitting on the road.
So What?
So--if the information highway metahpor is bogus (and it is) what do we call the data/voice/video/fax/audio infrastructure?
Me? I like the term "data pipe", if, for no other reason than it would let me use the word "spigot" a lot.
Mick Souder
masouder@alex.stkate.edu
Coordinator, New Pathways Project, College of St. Catherine
Acting Coordinator, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network Internet Project
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