The Uniqueness of the Internet

The Uniqueness of the Internet ToC

I've suggested above that your view of the public service versus deregulation debate as regards broadcasting is likely to colour your attitude towards the same debate with respect to the Internet. But you might object that the Internet is fundamentally different from the press, radio and TV. The main characteristics which are usually singled out by those who claim that the Internet is unique are:

interactivity
user control
open access
global reach

Are these characteristics really unique to the Internet? Let's consider each in turn:

Interactivity ToC

One could argue that radio and TV are also 'interactive' in the sense that readers of broadcast texts are always free to make what they want of them. We (think we) know from the 'New Audience Research' (see the lengthy section on recent developments in effects research) that, from right and left of the political spectrum, the well established critiques of Mass Society were overly simplistic and that there is not, and never has been, a Mass Society or Mass Culture. There is a mass audience in the sense that television is a one-to-many medium which addresses millions of viewers simultaneously because, in a variety of different ways, viewers construct their own, possibly oppositional, meanings out of the signifying content of the messages. The very pattern of media consumption can differ radically from one person to another, form one family to another. The teenager researching her homework on the Web, while listening to her favourite CD, whilst MTV videos flicker across the TV screen visible from the corner of her eye, until she hits the channel button and hops somewhere else, soon to come back to MTV again, briefly pausing the CD player and turning up the volume on the TV - is she a member of a mass audience, a member of several mass audiences? In what meaningful sense can we speak of her as an audience member at all? It seems to me therefore that those who proclaim a new demassification of the mass audience through the Internet rather overstate their case:

While the media have become indeed globally interconnected, and programs and messages circulate in the global network, we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed

Castells (1996 : 341 (original emphasis))

Presumably those who single out the Internet's interactivity as unique are thinking of some other quality, namely the ability to answer back, to contribute. But conventional mass media offer a similar interactivity in that we can participate in phone-ins or vote on issues by dialling a freephone number, we can write letters to the editor, the programme makers, the Radio Times, we can enter the 'video booth' and leave a comment, our choices are fed back through ratings and circulation figures, we can complain to the Advertising Standards Authority, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission etc. You might object that that's all subject to controls which don't apply on the Internet. Broadcasters use a delay which allows them to censor offensive remarks from phone-in comments, for example, letters page editors reject or edit letters, but, then, many USENET groups and mailing lists are moderated and persistent offenders will be booted out. The same often applies to chat and message forums. I suspect also that if I developed an offensive site here, my ISP, in view of the lack of clarity in UK law as regards the ISP's liability would probably close me down. It's probably as well also to bear in mind, when claiming a unique interactivity for the Internet, that public access television also offers interactivity, as do CB and short-wave radio, teletext and, for that matter, the telephone.

As you may have noticed, it's a concern of mine here to counteract the massive hype surrounding the Internet. Nevertheless, although I'm generally saying 'look, this isn't really so different from what we already know', it would be as well to bear in mind the 'to be or not to be' effect of television, which Castells emphasizes in his discussion of TV. Audience members may be able to negotiate their own readings, advertisers may shell out billions with little directly measurable effect, but

in a society organized around mass media, the existence of messages that are outside the media is restricted to interpersonal networks, thus disappearing from the collective mind

Castells (1996 : 336)

The interactivity offered by the Internet provides the electronic analogue of those 'interpersonal networks' and thus the possibility of keeping otherwise marginalized topics before the 'collective mind'.

Intercreativity ToC

What is certainly missing from the Web as yet is what Tim Berners-Lee (the 'inventor' of the Web) has described as 'intercreativity', rather than mere 'interactivity'. If we take interactivity to mean deciding which links to follow, filling in on-line forms, contributing to a Web-based message forum, then intercreativity is a step beyond that. As I understand it, Berners-Lee is referring to the genuine group interactivity of working on a Web-based project or working on a project via the Web. That kind of interactivity is not as yet available. It would require, as Berners-Lee suggests, more intuitive interfaces which would allow us the verbal cutting of corners and reduction of formality and the speed of interaction which we find in collaborative group projects. That, in its turn, depends on trust amongst the participants in the group and therefore calls for some kind of readily managed security, such as digitally signed certificates. As an example of some of the creative potential for the 'arts' of intercreativity on the Web, you might enjoy the intriguing experiment run by amazon.com on-line bookshop, in which the short story Murder Makes the Magazine (seems to have disappeared?) was started and ended by John Updike and completed by 44 others who contributed on-line.
[For further information on Tim Berners-Lee, see Wendy Robinson's page of Internet Pioneers at the University of North Carolina]

The Internet as postmodern experience ToC

There seems to be a view widespread amongst some commentators that the experience of modern media, perhaps most obviously of the Internet, is the quintessentially postmodern experience (anyone who objects to the juxtaposition of 'quintessentially' and 'postmodern', see me after class). Typical of this experience is postmodern fragmentation as we zap from one TV channel to another, open up a dozen hyperlinks in different windows, briefly check our e-mail while waiting for a graphic to download, hit the CD remote control because it's just playing a track we don't like. Where the Internet is concerned, we are also offered, through chat-rooms and even through our own home pages, the option to experiment with a variety of personae, which fits quite neatly with the postmodern concept of the decentred subject. And speed, of course, is also often cited as one of the essential characteristics of postmodernity (though it seems to me it was one of the determinants of modernity too). Certainly the speed with which kids brought up on video games operate their machines and process great gobbets of information thrown at them in the everyday cyberblitz is something that leaves an old bugger like me gasping for mental breath. Am I just too old to develop into a cyborg? Or could it be that I muck about for too long trying to turn information into knowledge, which is surely a relatively slow and reflective process? I find some consolation in indications that the received truth that the new homo cyber really does process all this stuff is maybe not as obvious at it may appear - using mobile phones while driving leads to more accidents, for example - so maybe it's not just me.

User control ToC

Hype(r)text

What is generally singled out under the heading of user control is hypertext. Hypertexts provide us with links which we can choose to follow or not. That is certainly something relatively new in the way we deal with text on computer screens (well, for an old bloke like me it feels new, but Microsoft Windows help files have been offering hypertext ever since Windows first came on the scene) and, of course, such links are fundamental to Web navigation. I have seen some theorists argue that, unlike other computer applications such as word-processors, spreadsheets or graphics software, hypertext has no real-world parallel. This is an example of the massively overblown hype which surrounds so much discussion of the Internet. A moment's reflection shows that all printed text is potentially hypertext if we choose to use it that way. Indeed, we don't even have to choose to use a text in a particular way since all 'texts' (movies, radio broadcasts, printed texts etc.) are hypertexts to the extent that they are all intertextual; as Foucault expressed it in Archeology of Knowledge, no book's boundaries are fixed since it is always situated within a system of references to other books, other texts, other phrases, a node within a network of references. I don't see, as some theorists argue, that printed text is linear and hypertext non-linear. TV and radio broadcasts, movies are inescapably linear; printed text is linear if you want it to be, non-linear if you don't. I wouldn't personally ever read a novel by turning to the last few paragraphs first, but I know plenty of people who do. Some will search out the rude or gory bits first and then get around to starting at the beginning, if the rude and gory bits look rude and gory enough. I have long had a copy of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela, which is so designed that you can read it from beginning to end if you want or according to the jumps in a game of hopscotch if you prefer (for a detailed discussion of the hypertextual structure of Cortázar's novel, see the Electronic Labyrinth); I also have Jacques Roubaud's collection of poems Epsilon, which is designed to be read as one might read any collection of poems, but may also be read according to the moves in a game of go.

But we don't have to consider such relatively unusual texts. Think how you might read the daily paper. Unless it's the Tour de France season, I chuck the sports section into the bin straightaway. I very rapidly scan the contents list on the front of the business section to see if there's any news of major media groups - if not, it rapidly follows the sports section. I then probably turn to the columnists towards the back of the paper, rapidly scan the headlines of each article. If there's one that grabs my attention, I might start reading the first paragraph. If this maintains my attention, I might read the whole article; if not, I might start reading the newspaper's front page. Here I will start some articles and then jump straight to the last paragraph, others I will read all the way through; with yet others, I will simply read the headline and not bother with the article at all. I can make my own links between articles, too: I spot one in which Prime Minister Blair says the British Government would not use force to 'take out' the leaders of the Real IRA because that's undemocratic and contrary to international law; so I then wonder how he justifies his support for President Clinton ordering attacks on foreign countries said to be harbouring Islamic terrorists and therefore rapidly scan through the paper in search of some comment on that.

It is also claimed that hypertext has no end, unlike traditional printed text. Again, this is not my experience of reading the daily newspaper and, in any case, a 'closed' hypertext does have an end. By 'closed' hypertext I mean a hypertext which contains a (comparatively) finite amount of information, just as a newspaper has, say, 32 pages and no more. The end comes either when the reader has read everything there is to read or simply gets fed up with the reading. (Where hyperfiction is concerned, it is true that there is no 'end' in the sense of narrative closure - this is discussed below in a little more detail.) For all practical purposes, of course, hypertext on the Web is infinite. In an effort to communicate what hypertext is really all about (and to showcase their erudition, no doubt), cultural commentators will often refer to the story The Garden of Forking Paths by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in which an author creates a labyrinthine story wherein all events are possible and all things can take place in multiple permutations - a suggestive analogy for hypertext, no doubt, but I feel that Borges's description of the Library of Babel is a more apt analogue of my experience of the Web:

for every reasonable line or straightforward statement there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences

Borges (1956 : 88)

and

[the Library contains] all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minute detail of the history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the falsehood of those catalogues, the demonstration of the falsehood of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basîlides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the version of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books

Borges (1956 : 89-90)

For examples of hypertext fiction, see Mark Amerika's altx

An early vision of hypertext ToC

One aspect of hypertext which is significantly different from printed text is the ability to search for specified text. At least where web-pages are concerned, that facility is primitive in the extreme, unless the site owner has provided some more sophisticated facility than what is offered by the browser itself. In due course, no doubt, the sort of search facilities available on hypertext CDs such as Microsoft's Encarta or Cinemania, as well as all the other facilities which CDs offer, will also become feasible on the Web, but the technology has some way to go yet. There is also the problem, at a higher level than individual pages, of the credibility of the information provided. How do you know, when coming to this site, that you are going to find reliable information here? If you have come from a standard search on a standard search engine, the only information you have on this site is the description I submitted to the search engine. So, in addition to the need for more sophisticated search and organizational tools to be incorporated (presumably) within the browser software, there is clearly also a need for some kind of 'metadata', i.e. data about data. To an extent, that's already provided via the reviews offered by, say, Lycos or Encyclopædia Britannica, as well as by reviews on specialist sites, but there's clearly a need for more such metadata.

A second significant difference between hypertext (on the Web at any rate) and printed text is that the former is (or at least has the potential to be) 'live'. You can come back here tomorrow and find that this article is longer than it was yesterday, argues the opposite of what it argued yesterday, has different links from yesterday's or has disappeared entirely. This particular website is constantly growing and evolving. At present I am engaged in typing up this article you are now reading. A short while ago, I was amending some of the details in the section on media ownership. Yesterday, I brought the bibliographical references up to date.

At the moment the technology offers some of the functionality envisaged by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 proposal for a 'Memex' machine. Bush's article, entitled As We May Think is often quoted by commentators on the Internet, partly because it is striking how accurately he foresaw a technology for knowledge-processing, some of which we can recognize today as having been implemented, and partly also because it raises questions as to the further facilities we might like hypertext to develop.

The article proposes the development of the Memex, which would allow an individual to store and rapidly retrieve documents, to follow random associations between pairs of documents and store the 'trails' of those associations, together with any additional comments the individual might wish to add. You can recognize in it some of the technological advances we have made since his time, and you will certainly recognize that hypertext meets some of his requirements. You might also find it interesting to ask yourself just what we haven't achieved yet (for example, we don't have an easy and really intuitive way of editing hypertext and making new hypertext links), how desirable it is to achieve what we can't yet do and how you would go about achieving the other functions which his idealized Memex should be able to carry out. You might also wish to reflect on the social purpose which Bush envisaged for his Memex: it was to be a machine which would enable us to cope with the information overload which was already apparent in 1945 and thereby enable us to retrieve knowledge more rapidly, apply it more effectively and extend it more easily. Although Bush presents his Memex as an individual's machine, it is clear that many of his requirements would be better met by networked machines, though he could hardly be expected to have imagined those in 1945. Bush was a true visionary, motivated by a deep concern for the betterment of humanity. His Memex was to be a tool to allow humanity to use the record of science for good and 'encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience', rather than 'perish in conflict'. If you would like to consult the article, you will find it at http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml
[For further information on Bush, see Wendy Robinson's page of Internet Pioneers at the University of North Carolina] [If you need a history of Internet development, see Howard Rheingold's on-line book on Virtual Communities, especially chapter 3]

Another early hypertext visionary is Ted Nelson. Read up on his Xanadu Ideal and check out his home page.

'Creative' uses of hypertext ToC

In principle one might expect hypertext to take us away from the readerly to the writerly text, one might expect the authorial authority of conventional narrative structures to be undermined by hypertext. Certainly, if you read Barthes's description of the writerly text in S/Z, you'll recognize that he could be describing what we now call hypertext. The potential is there, certainly, but it depends entirely on the author whether that potential is realized or not. You may feel as you hop around these pages as if you're putting together your own reading experience, but you're only doing so to the extent that I've provided you with the hyperlinks. No link, no hop. You might argue that hypertext links provide the reader with multiple points of view. Possibly, but again that depends on the author and her aims. An author presenting an argument might have the integrity to summarize accurately countervailing arguments in her printed text, or she might not. Equally, she might provide the reader with links to counterarguments or she might not. I have to say that I find the openness of some hypertext frustrating. It can be exciting and exhilarating to work through a text liberally peppered with hyperlinks, to chase up new ideas, new nuances of old ideas, refutations of the idea which one has just read and so on, but it can also be frustrating to lose the thread of the argument being presented. Where hyperfiction is concerned I sometimes experience a similar frustration. Again, it can be an exhilarating experience, but sometimes it can be irritating that the author seems to have had to spend more time on holding all the links together than crafting a story (or network of potential stories). I find that I miss the conventions of narrative, psychologically coherent protagonists, narrative closure and so on. Maybe, I'm just incurably pre-pomo, but, coming back to Borges again, I am reminded of his fictitious author Herbert Quain, writer of 'regressive, ramified', multilinear novels. Referring to one of his novels, Quain says: 'I lay claim for this work to the essential features of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium' (1956 : 79) Tedium, indeed, seems often to be a characteristic of hypertext, in my experience.

If you want to explore the possibilities of creative use of hypertext, the classic hypertext novel is said to be afternoon: a story by Michael Joyce. I confess I've never read it, partly because, unsurprisingly, it's not available on the Web for free. It can be obtained from Eastgate Systems Inc. for $19.95. Joyce's Twelve Blue is, however, available for free and is a must if you want to explore the concept of hyperfiction. (See also Joyce's homepage) Another much-acclaimed hypertext novel is Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, which I also have not read. You can find an article about it at http://www.alumni.gatech.edu/news/alummag/sum94/fiction.html and a sampler at http://www.eastgate.com/VG/VGStart.html and you may well find Moulthrop's hypertext essay on Cortázar's Rayuela of interest. The Color of Television is a hyperfiction by Moulthrop and Sean Cohen. One hypertext novel which is on-line for free is Harry Goldstein's The Lung Prophet (may not be suitable for little kids! -seems to have disappeared; try the hyperfiction reading list). If you've got the time to do it justice, Ruth Nestvold's Cutting Edges gives an intriguing glimpse of how fiction could develop on the Web. If you don't have time to read it properly now, bookmark it for later - it repays attentive and exploratory reading. And don't miss Leila Ray's constantly evolving magazine, One-Zero-One. One of the more extravagant hypertexts is Mark Amerika's Grammatron. You'll find a number more hypertexts at turbulence and can even read James Joyce in hypertext at http://www.mpx.com.au/~charles/WR/intro.html If you're interested in hypertextual poetry, try the Electronic Poetry Center. Most of the attempts at hypertext novels, short stories or magazines I've come across on the Web, however much freedom they may offer the reader to create her own reading experience (or writing experience if you prefer Barthes' way of looking at it) are normally self-contained in the sense that the links are usually links to other parts of the same site (as are, for example, most of the links on this site). One site whose articles/stories provide lots of external links is the fascinating and punchy WWWench, who, along with Ruth Nestvold, in my opinion comes closer to realizing the full potential of hyperfiction/hyper-reportage on the Web than most other sites I've examined.

So, I started this section by suggesting that there's really not a lot of difference between hypertext and any other printed text, it just depends how you use it; and now I've ended by suggesting you look at some sites where I think maybe hypertext does make a difference. But I have to say I don't think it makes all that much difference - yet. And the 'yet' is due to the fact that writing hypertext, even the simple stuff I'm doing here, is bloody difficult. The coding itself is a no-brainer; the big problem is remembering how it's all supposed to fit together - I can certainly understand why the author of the labyrinthine story in Borges's Garden of the Forking Paths committed suicide! The 'yet' is also due to the fact that it's going to take us quite a while to realize what the full potential really is. You could, for example, use, say, coloured text or a certain mixture of fonts in the manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs. Why not? Well, I don't know why not because I've not tried it and I can't recall seeing any other sites which have. The potential must be there, though, because you know that blue underlined text in these articles is a link, you know that indicates a link to an external site, you know that the buttons at the top and bottom of articles will take you through linked sequences and, as with any other text, if you've been reading through these articles for a while you've developed a feel for what is a main heading, what's a first-level subhead, what's second-level etc. So, at least in principle, the possibility of developing leitmotifs is there, but I don't know how far it can be taken and I don't know of any research into this. Certainly, such research as I am familiar with suggests that going beyond three levels of subhead is a waste of time because the reader just loses track of the system and, as for icons and buttons, can you remember what all those widgets across the top of your wordprocessor do? I suppose you could have sound, which would bring us even closer to the Wagnerian concept. You could have 3D too, though the more ambitious attempts I've seen so far are pretty dismal VRML worlds, which just leave you floating in space for no apparent purpose. As the technology develops, though, 3d might have some interesting applications. Obviously, it would enable us to build our own 3d worlds and wander through other people's (but the software would have to be a hell of a lot easier to use!), which could be quite useless, but intriguing. We're starting to see that to some extent with some shopping portals, but I confess I don't really see the point of those. I'm not really convinced either that seeing a sports trainer in 3 and being able to spin it around and view it from all angles (as you could at boo.com) is really worth the wait. It could be that 3d technology could be developed for some very interesting mapping of 'conceptual spaces', a rudimentary, but quite beautiful, example of which can be seen in the 3d thesaurus at www.plumbdesign.co.uk. All of this of course is some way off, as, so far, all these technological gizmos don't work all that well - yet. If you would like to examine some of the possibilities of interface design, take a look at deadsheeplinks

Open access ToC

As for the Internet's being accessible to anyone, I know plenty of people who can't even afford a daily newspaper, let alone the hundreds of pounds it costs to access the Internet. Whether it should be open to anyone is, of course, another matter, which brings us back to the public service debate discussed above. I am confident that in due course prices will fall to the point where the technology will be available to just about everyone in our western societies. Presumably by that time, the technology will be quite considerably different from what we use at present. Over the last couple of years we have seen the development of so-called 'thin clients', i.e. machines which are not stuffed full of RAM, massive hard drive space and so on, but which are essentially 'fuelled' from the Internet. Rather than having a huge suite of complex office software on your machine, wordprocessing software is temporarily pulled down from the Internet when you want to write a letter, an extra bit is pulled down if you want to do something fancy with the letter like insert a table; if you want to work on a spreadsheet, yet another piece of software is downloaded, and so on. As for your data, that would be stored somewhere out on the Internet. When you move from one thin client to another, even to one across the other side of the world, you insert your smart card, and the computer desktop configures itself to your preferences and allows access to your data. Except on local area networks, thin clients haven't really yet taken off, though there have been some developments in that direction - for example, with the release of Microsoft's Windows 98, it has become standard that operating system and certain applications will be automatically updated in the background; some companies offer to store your configuration files on the Internet just in case you suffer a major crash; some companies offer to store backups of your data on the Internet. Although this technology still has a long way to go, you can see the way it's intended to develop: the Internet should relieve the user of the need to maintain the machine and the need to understand how it all works. The tendency is towards something that should be as easy to operate as all the other gizmos in the home entertainment centre and the Net offers perhaps the most obvious way of ensuring that it eventually evolves that way. Certainly, Microsoft's new .Net initiative looks as if it intended to take us all in that direction, Microsoft themselves probably becoming an ASP (application service provider) from whom we will temporarily rent the use of Word, Excel or whatever.

Taking these various qualities of the Internet together and projecting them into the future, Dale Spender (1995) foresees change as radical as the changes which ultimately resulted from the invention of the printing press:

'Knowledge' becomes unstable Spender suggests, where print accustomed us to think in terms of a stable body of knowledge, which can be subdivided into disciplines, the Internet and other computer technologies lead us to think of knowledge as process, unstable, unfixed, constantly changing, changeable, updateable and interdisciplinary. It will no longer be possible for a teacher to 'master' a discipline which is progressively revealed to students through a series of fifty minute lessons, where the subject is kept separate from other subjects. Knowledge will be seen as information which flows through cyberspace, interconnected with hyperlinks, and flowing 24 hours a day. Thus the classroom teacher will lose control and authority as a 'knower'; similarly authors will also lose control of their electronically published work, as users surf through the hyperlinks in whatever order they choose.

Mastery of print is downgraded The ability to deal with print will cease to have the high status which is accorded to it now, as a new generation of 'readers' who have grown up with multimedia engage in an activity Spender describes as closer to theatre than to the passive activity of reading, with the difference from the theatre that the user is herself one of the actors as well as an audience member.

Knowing where and how becomes more important than knowing what The high status accorded to 'knowers' will no longer apply. Examination systems have been developed to grant high status to those who can hold large amounts of information in their heads and fail those who can't. Holding knowledge in your head will cease to be so highly regarded when it becomes evident that you can use your head for other things, while the computer network is given the task of storing the knowledge. What becomes more important, then, is the skill of accessing the knowledge fast, quickly assessing which knowledge is relevant and then using it appropriately. We have already seen this in the eighties boom - City traders did not need to have Oxbridge degrees, nor even much formal education at all; what they needed was the ability to exploit the information the technology could give them.

Everybody becomes a publisher Publishing becomes democratized; there is no particular reason why anyone publishing on the Net should have served the formal apprenticeship which the conventional print-oriented academic has to go through - which, at the same time as it may raise doubts about the reliability of information on the Net, also seriously undermines the authority of the traditional knowledge-producers.

Intellectual property is everybody's As the printing press encouraged the development of the notion of authorship and intellectual property, so the Net has the ability totally to undermine such notions. Anyone can grab graphics, chunks of text from anyone else and put them back together in their own unique concoction. Whether in fact the Net will turn out in the long run to undermine such concepts remains to be seen. It is clear that major corporations are actively seeking methods to protect their intellectual property, possibly ultimately through the development of new technological fixes. How successful they will eventually be is an open question - the court judgment against Napster is surely a Pyrrhic victory as there are already loads of 'sons of Napster' around the Web.

	'Knowledge' becomes unstable	Spender suggests, where print accustomed us to think in terms of a stable body of knowledge, which can be subdivided into disciplines, the Internet and other computer technologies lead us to think of knowledge as process, unstable, unfixed, constantly changing, changeable, updateable and interdisciplinary. It will no longer be possible for a teacher to 'master' a discipline which is progressively revealed to students through a series of fifty minute lessons, where the subject is kept separate from other subjects. Knowledge will be seen as information which flows through cyberspace, interconnected with hyperlinks, and flowing 24 hours a day. Thus the classroom teacher will lose control and authority as a 'knower'; similarly authors will also lose control of their electronically published work, as users surf through the hyperlinks in whatever order they choose.
	Mastery of print is downgraded	The ability to deal with print will cease to have the high status which is accorded to it now, as a new generation of 'readers' who have grown up with multimedia engage in an activity Spender describes as closer to theatre than to the passive activity of reading, with the difference from the theatre that the user is herself one of the actors as well as an audience member.
	Knowing where and how becomes more important than knowing what	The high status accorded to 'knowers' will no longer apply. Examination systems have been developed to grant high status to those who can hold large amounts of information in their heads and fail those who can't. Holding knowledge in your head will cease to be so highly regarded when it becomes evident that you can use your head for other things, while the computer network is given the task of storing the knowledge. What becomes more important, then, is the skill of accessing the knowledge fast, quickly assessing which knowledge is relevant and then using it appropriately. We have already seen this in the eighties boom - City traders did not need to have Oxbridge degrees, nor even much formal education at all; what they needed was the ability to exploit the information the technology could give them.
	Everybody becomes a publisher	Publishing becomes democratized; there is no particular reason why anyone publishing on the Net should have served the formal apprenticeship which the conventional print-oriented academic has to go through - which, at the same time as it may raise doubts about the reliability of information on the Net, also seriously undermines the authority of the traditional knowledge-producers.
	Intellectual property is everybody's	As the printing press encouraged the development of the notion of authorship and intellectual property, so the Net has the ability totally to undermine such notions. Anyone can grab graphics, chunks of text from anyone else and put them back together in their own unique concoction. Whether in fact the Net will turn out in the long run to undermine such concepts remains to be seen. It is clear that major corporations are actively seeking methods to protect their intellectual property, possibly ultimately through the development of new technological fixes. How successful they will eventually be is an open question - the court judgment against Napster is surely a Pyrrhic victory as there are already loads of 'sons of Napster' around the Web.

The Internet