HG Wells and the Information Highway
excerpts from Brian R.
Gaines, "Convergence to the Information Highway" (1996)
The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when HG Wells was promoting the concept of a "world brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge. He remarks:
our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before." (HG Wells, World Brain, 1938)It was not until the 1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web that a system with many of the attributes of Wells' world brain came into being. The web makes available linked and indexed interactive multimedia documents so that it emulates the printed publication medium but also goes beyond it in offering sound, video, and interactivity.
The information highway may be seen as an extended "world brain" accessed through the personal computer that integrates all available media and means of discourse to give active presentations of, and interactive access to, all of human knowledge. The current facilities of the Internet and World Wide Web provide a primitive implementation of the highway.
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