Information Propagation

At the risk of drifting away from topics more closely related to NSPRI, I'd like to add onto some of the subject matter of last month's article (The Coming of Information Overload, vol.1, iss.2), in particular, some ideas occurred to me during a phone conversation about how the information highway, or whatever it is eventually called, might develop.

At the moment we have numerous online services that we can connect to: Internet, pay-services such as Compuserve and Genie , and a plethora of smaller BBS's run by individuals or small groups. We also have television, with its network, cable, satellite and video-rental empires, along with even other information sources. It seems unlikely that they will all grow together in peace and harmony but will have 'boundary disputes' fought by legions of lawyers whose main artillery is to confuse the issues involved. At the core of these boundary encounters will be the ability to transfer the flow of information from one medium to another. A few examples to illustrate what I mean are probably in order.