Information Superhighway

New York.--The increasingly insane and seemingly interminable bidding for control of Paramount Communications is being widely viewed as one of the definitive battles determining who will be the lords of communication in the dawning age of the global, broad band, interactive electronic superhighway.It is anything but. Optimistic estimates predict that the superhighway, whatever its configuration, will have reached only about 20 percent of American homes by the year 2000.It could therefore be well into the next century before it reaches even a level of saturation now enjoyed by the conventional cable industry, which has to date, despite phenomenal growth and profits, penetrated only about 65 percent of American homes.

WASHINGTON - I hate to say I told you so. Well, not really. Like most people, I rather enjoy it, to tell the truth. Not that one had to be a genius to foresee what happened this week: The music industry filing suit against 261 people who had downloaded songs from the Internet without paying for them. The lawsuit seeks as much as $150,000 per stolen song. Like I said: Big surprise. It didn't take a crystal ball to guess that an industry that estimates its piracy losses at more than $4 billion a year would eventually do something drastic.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Palo Alto has become the first city in the nation to set up shop on the Internet, opening its electronic doors to computer users all over the world and inviting them in to take a look around.For now, computer users who wander into the "City of Palo Alto Demonstration WWW Server," as the city's connection is called, will find basic information such as train schedules, City Hall directories and maps to all the local restaurants and coffee shops.But the possibilities are staggering.

A picture on the wall in Gary B. Smith's office shows the Nasdaq building in Times Square draped with Ciena Corp.'s banners. The picture wasn't taken during the high-flying days of the technology boom, when stock options flowed like champagne. It was snapped Jan. 11, 2002, long after Ciena and so many others had suffered huge layoffs and losses. "It's been a tumultuous ride," said Smith, Ciena's president and chief executive officer. The facade of telecommunications took hundreds of companies on the ride of a lifetime, bringing many of them to an abrupt end when the bottom fell out in 2001.

IF YOU think America has become a nation of haves and have-nots, just wait. The arrival of the much-heralded information superhighway will only worsen the trend.In the 1980s America became more unequal, for several reasons. A factory economy with a broad, blue-collar middle class increasingly gave way to a service economy -- a polarized category that includes more fast-food workers and more investment bankers.Trade unions were significantly weakened. Economic globalization put unskilled U.S. workers into direct competition with workers overseas who do the same jobs for lower pay.Government stopped leaning against the wind.

Richard Pryor once joked that movies about the future made him nervous because the future didn't seem to include black people.Until recently the same could be said for the computer revolution. In all the talk about modems and megabytes, African-Americans were conspicuously absent.But that's changing. More black people are going on-line for a variety of reasons -- economic, political and cultural. And some simply find computers fascinating."When you explain what this technology is capable of, all people want to join in," said Delores Davis-Penn, a gerontologist at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo. "Information is power, and computers give you access to information from around the world."

WE LIVE IN the time of the information superhighway, which is a wonderful thing because, from the privacy of your own home, all you need is a modem and some software and you can spend quality computer time with, say, Nelson Mandela's Web page or, more likely, Pamela Anderson Lee's.But there is a danger on this road to limitless possibility, including the danger of too many highway metaphors.Here's one: If you look closely on the shoulder of the information superhighway, you might find your own personal privacy scattered there like so much road kill.

She's a living legend and the namesake of their school.But Rosa Parks, mother of the modern-day civil rights movement, remained a distant figure from history for most students at Baltimore's Rosa Parks-St. Ambrose Catholic School. She was a lesson they had to learn, someone their teachers and parents held up as a role model.Until yesterday, when the tiny, 81-year-old woman paid a visit to fifth-graders in Baltimore -- without ever leaving Detroit.Call it the '60s civil rights movement meets the '90s information superhighway.

BLACKOUTS AND BROWNOUTS are all too common for the world's biggest Internet access provider, Northern Virginia's America Online Inc. Its popularity has mushroomed so fast that paid customers often can't log-on. That infuriates AOL's 8 million clients and poses troubling questions about future gridlock as the popularity of computer networking grows.AOL's current problems stem from a marketing decision to charge a flat-rate fee of $19.95 a month for unlimited use. Three-quarters of AOL's subscribers switched, and new subscribers signed up in droves.

FIVE OR SIX YEARS from now a traveler in a log boat on the Amazon may be able to punch up an Australian web site on his portable computer, leave an e-mail message at his New York office and check his bank balance in London. Two Seattle companies, Teledesic and aerospace giant Boeing Co., are teaming up to develop a network of low-orbiting satellites to make such easy communications on the global Internet a reality. Others are developing similar systems.A few years ago, futurists spoke convincingly about the "wiring" of a world in which telephones, televisions and computers would all be linked by global networks of fiber optic and coaxial cables.

Look no farther than the elegant masthead on the cover of this newspaper to be reminded of what was. Carved into the nameplate are symbols of Baltimore and America's economy. The steam locomotive. A ship. A bale of grain.As the 21st century approaches, a computer terminal and a satellite might be etched in as well. Indeed, a worker of a hundred years ago -- when hardware meant hammers and screwdrivers, not a keyboard or CPU -- would be lost in today's maze of techno jargon.The modern industrial revolution at the turn of the century evolved from an emphasis on railroad and telegraph -- the original information superhighway -- to the manufacturing of steel, oil, chemicals, autos, airplanes, packaged foods and drugs.

It was the Saturday before Labor Day, 1969. Len Kleinrock and a throng of shaggy-haired grad students were pacing a loading dock on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their new baby. One student cradled a bottle of champagne.Before long it came: a 900-pound crate fresh off the plane from Boston. The group gingerly unpacked its contents, revealing a gunmetal gray computer the size of a Coke machine. It had four steel eyebolts welded to its lid so it could be lifted by crane or helicopter.

Someday, historians may look back and mark these pre-millennial years B.N. and A.N. - Before the Net and After the Net.Not to say the Internet is a second coming (no matter what all those Web entrepreneurs say). But this technology has become a force in American life like none other. These days people fall in love online, are born online, die online. It's a place where you can earn your Ph.D. or your first million.It's the medium rumormonger Matt Drudge (and later Congress) used to unleash accusations that threaten to bring down a president.

FIVE OR SIX YEARS from now a traveler in a log boat on the Amazon may be able to punch up an Australian web site on his portable computer, leave an e-mail message at his New York office and check his bank balance in London. Two Seattle companies, Teledesic and aerospace giant Boeing Co., are teaming up to develop a network of low-orbiting satellites to make such easy communications on the global Internet a reality. Others are developing similar systems.A few years ago, futurists spoke convincingly about the "wiring" of a world in which telephones, televisions and computers would all be linked by global networks of fiber optic and coaxial cables.

"The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway," by Ken Auletta (Random House. 346 pages. $27.50). No writer knows better than Ken Auletta the workings, wranglings and writhing of the men (yes, few if any women) who fashion and control American mass communications. His "Three Blind Mice" defined the television industry. His regular contributions to the New Yorker, "Annals of Communications," are simply the most insightful and inclusive reports on the entire complex of the modern American broadcast and print information and entertainment world.

BLACKOUTS AND BROWNOUTS are all too common for the world's biggest Internet access provider, Northern Virginia's America Online Inc. Its popularity has mushroomed so fast that paid customers often can't log-on. That infuriates AOL's 8 million clients and poses troubling questions about future gridlock as the popularity of computer networking grows.AOL's current problems stem from a marketing decision to charge a flat-rate fee of $19.95 a month for unlimited use. Three-quarters of AOL's subscribers switched, and new subscribers signed up in droves.

LOST in the technological revolution? Confused about access to the Internet? Does the jargon go in one ear and out the other, leaving you with the impression that wonks who can't speak English have taken over the world?Then pity the educators. Here they are at the beginning, or maybe it's the middle, or maybe it's near the end of a revolution in progress. There's considerable pressure from students, parents and colleagues to "get on line," but that's expensive. What if they go with Brand X, and Brand X goes out of business next week?

WE LIVE IN the time of the information superhighway, which is a wonderful thing because, from the privacy of your own home, all you need is a modem and some software and you can spend quality computer time with, say, Nelson Mandela's Web page or, more likely, Pamela Anderson Lee's.But there is a danger on this road to limitless possibility, including the danger of too many highway metaphors.Here's one: If you look closely on the shoulder of the information superhighway, you might find your own personal privacy scattered there like so much road kill.

WOULD YOU rather keep mum about the size of your inheritance? The number of times you've been nailed for speeding? How much you paid for your house -- or still have left to pay? How about the intimate details of your divorce settlement? Sorry, but all that is likely to be a matter of public record. And these days that means it's only a keystroke away.Years ago someone would at least have had to use up some shoe leather to do the kind of sleuthing -- or snooping -- necessary to peer into the details of your life.