Hitching a High-Speed Train

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the Winter 1996 issue of International Educator. In celebration of NAFSA's 75th anniversary, IE is taking a look back at the topics and moments that have defined the field since the magazine began publication 33 years ago.

Just outside the confines of our offices and homes, the tracks of the Information Age have been laid over the course of more than thirty years. Odds are that sometime in the past five years you have crossed them, or maybe you are a familiar face at the depot.

Almost certainly by now a colleague or student has asked you for your e-mail address. You’ve at least thumbed a magazine article or glanced at a television feature heralding the Internet or received an unsolicited floppy disk in the mail from America Online, CompuServe, or Prodigy.

The Internet as buzzword reaches the far corners of American cultural life, a populist phenomenon seen in the creation of the World Wide Web pages devoted to the Virgin Mary (“She has appeared on the Internet”) and to the antitechnological Amish way of life. The infrastructure and control of the Internet, however, is in the midst of an antipopulist movement that may leave this “information superhighway” largely in the hands of corporate Gargantuans. For this reason, it may be more useful to view the technology as a rail system on which most of us will merely book passage. We will leave to others the track laying, the vehicle making, even the