ABSTRACT
Nothing has been as much celebrated in our times as the information superhighway. Everyone is agreed that never before has information proliferated so profusely, diminishing as is commonly thought the boundaries and barriers that have held people apart—though many voices have sought to distinguish between “knowledge” and “information,” while other shave railed at how the overwhelming surfeit of information has made some people incapable of thinking beyond trivia and the “factoid.” We speak with unreflective ease of the “information revolution,” and in this clichéd expression there is the most unambiguous assertion of confidence in the benign telos of history. Some commentators, alluding to more recent developments such as e-commerce, speak even of going “beyond the information revolution,” but there is something of a consensus that the information revolution has been to our age what the Industrial Revolution was to the eighteenth century. 1
