Dan Hunter

WHAT THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY REALLY MEANS.

Last year you would have been lucky if you saw the term "information superhighway" in a technical magazine. This year, the term crops up in everything from computer mags, to the newspaper to "Gardening Today". But one thing that everyone keeps ignoring is what the hell it is, and what its effect will be on your life. This column will aim to redress that imbalance. It will focus on those aspects of the information superhighway that will affect the lives and work of those in the entertainment, music, video, book, and related industries. This column will look at the information superhighway as it currently stands and as it may be in the foreseeable future. It will, in subsequent issues, examine why book and magazine publishers are an endangered species, why 500 channels of pay television is a myth, and what will be the nightmare of multimedia.

But before we dive into that ocean we"re going to need a dinghy and some navigational charts. Time to start with the basics.

The infobahn

The first thing to recognise is that the term "information superhighway" is abominable. It rolls off the tongue like a brick. The Europeans and increasingly more Americans have taken to calling it the "infobahn". Hence the name of this column.

Now that we have the terminology right, let"s look at what it is. At the moment it"s mostly a fantasy. The idea is that we will have a huge network connecting virtually every place on the planet. This network will carry all types of informationÑwhether voice, data, television signals, newspaper articles, movies, electronic mail, and so on. It will mean educational information in schools and home, video-on-demand, data piped into every home and a new way of viewing the world. The network might be based on fibre-optic cable, satellites, microwave transmission, or some method yet to be invented. Its physical makeup is unimportant; the salient feature is that it will be able to disseminate huge amounts of information.

The third thing to understand is that the current fascination with the infobahn stems more from computer manufacturers seeing a great opportunity to sell more product, than it does with any real desire to empower people. Not for nothing have some called it the "information super-hype-way". But no matter; this thing is going to affect the way we live so profoundly that no matter how it comes into existence we can't ignore it.

So, what is the effect of this on the arts and entertainment industry? To understand this we need to think about the nature of the product it generates, and the concept of digitisation.

Digitisation as definition

The arts and entertainment industry is special: it"s product comes from intellectual and creative endeavour. It is all about different types of ideas, presented in lots of different ways. But these ideas are information, and information can be turned into computer data. This is generically referred to as "digitisation". You can digitise a painting, a television show, a telephone conversation, and so on. The digital signal can then be sent at high speeds around the world, with absolutely no loss of quality.

This digital revolution has significant impact on our expectations of how we distribute artistic product, the nature of the entertainment industry and what it will be to be an artist. This becomes more worrying when you consider that the infobahn knows no national boundaries, and the Americans and the Europeans have more money than we do to exploit these possibilities. In the end, that"s what this column is about. How we need to change our assumptions. What we can do to adapt to the juggernaut that is racing towards us. And whether it is a good or bad thing.

I said earlier that the infobahn was mostly a fantasy. But I neglected to mention that there is the beginning of the infobahn already out there and working. It is called the Internet, and it is the vast network of networks of academic, military, government and now commercial computer systems. It is currently used mostly to disseminate text, but digitisation means that there is no reason why it won"t be the basis for the infobahn in years to come. We will look at how these things will work in the next few issues.

Next issue: "Why publishers are an endangered species"

Dan Hunter is a lawyer and computer scientist who lectures at the Law School, University of Melbourne. He can be contacted on the Internet at dah@rumpole.law.edu.au