But as I look into my crystal ball, one thing does seem very clear to me. Despite all the gigabytes upon gigabytes of information that will be available to us, despite the best efforts of applications to sort and present all this information to us, we will not become any cleverer. Indeed, creativity is something I believe we will have to look to protect in the information society. Not because I believe that all this technology is going to somehow dry up the creative juices of mankind. Quite on the contrary - technology should allow us to express our creativity in new ways.
Content is what the information society is all about.
It is the end product that all the mainframes, servers, network switches, application programs and communications protocols are ultimately designed to deliver. In the information society, we are witnessing simultaneously an explosion and a convergence of content. An explosion because new technology is enabling content to be created and disseminated in totally new ways. Digital images, whether of string concertos, oil paintings or Greek epics, have characteristics in common which mark them out from previous ways of storing information. They can be copied with perfect quality and transmitted across the world almost instantly at the touch of a button.