Information Superhighway

No one really uses that term in 2009. I guess the Internet is too ubiquitous; it's not "Super" anymore. In the shower this morning, I was remembering a time when our principal, during his morning announcements used it in an analogy describing how fast-paced and exciting high school is. Except, he said, "Super Information Highway," and some of us laughed. To be clear, a few of the nerds laughed. It was 1995, and not too many of us knew what the Information Superhighway was.

At the time though, Prodigy and Compuserve were already starting to lose ground to America Online and Netscape was duking it out with Internet Explorer. It seemed like every night there was a news report about the "World Wide Web" and the "Information Superhighway." And a particular hysteria about how, "Pornographic images are now available to anyone with a computer and a phone line!" In retrospect, that hysteria was probably the best advertising the Internet could have gotten. While some people were avoiding the "Interwebs" and all its perverts, everyone else was buying modems specifically to look for low resolution photos of women in bikinis one tiny image at a time. "If your modem downloads at 14.4 kbps, this will take approximately 10 min., at 28.8 kbps, this will take aproximately 5 min."

And that's how it was, really slow and with limited content. I largely used the World Wide Web to look up sports scores I could have otherwise gotten from ESPN, and more than anything else, to feel cool. This certainly wasn't the "wave of the future" everyone was talking about, it was just too slow. But it was exclusive. Among other things, you needed to have a computer, a modem, a second phone line, and the willingness to pay $20 per month to an Internet Service Provider so you could download things really slowly. I cannot emphasize enough how damn slow the Internet was.

Anyway, it was 1995 and the principal had said, "Super Information Highway." Four of us looked at each other and laughed our asses off. Maybe another half a dozen had heard about the World Wide Web on the news, but couldn't care less. The rest just thought the principal talking out of his butt again, something he was prone to do.

I was thinking though, if it had been 1990 and he said that, nobody would have known what he was talking about at all. It would have just been some random jumble of words, "You're a sophomore, riding the Super Information Highway!" barely relatable to our high school lives.

I wasn't in high school in 2000, but I'm going to imagine that a lot more students would have laughed. By 2000, content was finally starting to come around and more people were getting their first taste of high-speed Internet. Moreover still, there weren't any laws preventing the distribution of MP3s yet, so Napster was king.

And in 2009, "Super Information Highway," would probably garner a laugh from the same four nerds. But only because the nerds would be the only ones who had heard this archaic phrase. Everyone else would be too busy texting, or watching YouTube videos on their iPhones to even notice anything was said at all.

Just a thought.