'Information Superhighway' offers unimaginable rides

The Information Superhighway. How often does society label its constructs "super"? There's Superman, not the ubermench, but Clark Kent of Krypton--faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, more powerful than a locomotive.

Speaking of speed, planes come to mind. Fighter planes can go supersonic, Boeing is building a super jumbo jet. As for power, the now defunct supercollider springs readily to mind. For glamor and mystery, superstars grace the pages of society magazines; for the wonderful student, a teacher has nothing but superlatives to offer. The Information Superhighway has the same aura as the above examples. Calling the evolving information infrastructure a "superhighway" implies something extraordinary, beyond normal.

Once built, what exactly does an Information Superhighway do? For cable and telecommunications firms, a properly-built highway would ensure them superior profits. School superintendents want it to reduce the disparities in information resources between rich and poor districts by means of on-line libraries and text files. Commercial vendors need it to supersede geographical distance so they can offer home shopping opportunities. For students, it offers the opportunity to do time-consuming research quickly right from their own dorm rooms.

Have you heard of the Web? No, it's not where a spider lives. It's closer to what is called the telecommunications web--a compilation of information, more information than you could possibly imagine (or need). An incident this past weekend made me realize the Web's potential.

A friend who lives down the hall from me was writing a paper on Senate committees. He needed to know the first name of a senator from Vermont. I called up Dukenet, quickly navigated through various menus, and less than three minutes later I had a list of every senator, in addition to his or her office address and phone number. Now, such information might seem insignificant, but the fact that I could learn such trivia without even leaving my desk absolutely stunned me.

Other random items littering the Web include the Central Intelligence Agency's world factbook, a connection to most of the important college libraries, on-line periodicals, college newspapers (among which The Chronicle will hopefully soon number), unpublished papers from any scholarly field you could imagine and pretty much anything else you truly want to find. The only difficulty with the Web is its organizational structure.

The Web is a huge, decentralized, anarchic collection of network computers found on the Internet. Most documents on different web servers have been modified with something called the Hypertext Markup Language. These modifications allow the computer to use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol to retrieve documents from another web site. To introduce yet more technical jargon, every web site has its own Universal Resource Location.

Now, I understand almost nothing about how the Web actually works, and some irate computer scientists will most likely complain that I've incorrectly explained how the Web works. In any case, all that the technical gobbledygook means for average users is that they can retrieve information from other web sites without actually knowing which computer has the desired data; the problem, however, is that finding the computer which has the information you want might be difficult unless you know where to look.