ABSTRACT

In a capitalist society, one would expect to see any opportunity to make money as a great opportunity. Some, myself included, remember a better time in the age of the Internet. The “Information Superhighway” was just that. Researchers used the Net to collaborate and communicate across institutions. When the “Information Superhighway” was first opened to the masses, we still shared everything. No one worried whether someone else “borrowed” a picture or icon from another’s page, or whether someone “copped” your code. Then Citibank, Disney, and McDonald’s started cruising. Now the “Superhighway” is strung with banks, fast-food chains, brokerages, and malls of every sort. One informal study showed that in 1995, media outlets were transfixed with the Internet as an amazing source of knowledge. Major newspapers in the United States and abroad referred to the “Information Superhighway” in 4,562 stories, and articles mentioned “e-commerce” or “electronic commerce” only 915 times. One year later, coverage of the Internet as an information superhighway fell to 2,370 stories in major newspapers-about half the previous year’s level, while coverage of electronic commerce nearly doubled, with mentions in 1,662 articles. In 1999, the media changed focus from information superhighway imagery, with only 842 mentions in major papers, to mentions of e-commerce in 20,641 articles.