ABSTRACT
Technologies, especially computer-based technologies, tend to attract a fanatical following. This is even true in the field of computer use in education, although the fanatics may be in a minority. These followers voraciously devour every new advance, savouring the technical wizardry and ever faster and more complex performance of the latest hardware and software. Going further than McLuhan’s ‘The medium is the message’, for some, the medium is all there is. Perhaps techno-fever has never been so great as it is today in response to multimedia, the combination of any three of text, images, sound, video or animation in one package. The enthusiasm is especially great where the delivery of multimedia is envisaged over the Internet (the Net) or its more recent incarnation, the World Wide Web (WWW). Here, via telephone lines for the most part, millions of computers all over the world are linked. Anyone can set up a computer with his or her choice of material in any medium, and connect it to the Net. Everyone with Net access, i.e. with a computer, a modem and a service provider, can then access this information and even add to it. This idea has taken a hold in our collective cultural imagination to such an extent that every newspaper, feature film and most sizeable organisations appear to have established their own ‘web site’, and the URL (the address of these sites) with its instantly recognisable format (e.g. https://webpagesr.us/) has become so commonplace that puns playing on it are used to advertise beer.
