Just as the development of the Interstate Highway System led to the creation of McDonald's hamburgers, Holiday Inn and a thousand other new commercial developments that would have been impossible without the Interstate Highway System, in the same way we will see the emergence of information services on a nationwide basis that will be extremely profitable and nearly ubiquitous. Despite all the promises and 'possibilities' being articulated onto this new communications infrastructure, all indicators about the actual implementation of this electronic infrastructure actually point away from the universality, equality and democracy promised by governments and academics alike. For example, we are told that democracy will become absolutely direct with people voting in plebiscites from their homes. A system called TV Answer is at the forefront of this direct democracy. Another promise of the information superhighway has to do with its electronic replacement of actions currently carried out in physical space.
Examples range from shopping to education to medical examinations.
The significance of shifting these 'public' activities to the home and of using terms like telecommuting is that these metaphors of mobility and the public sphere mask the privatization and fixing in place that is actually occurring. Of course, it is easy enough to see the failure of the original 'Roads fight Blight' rhetoric of the highway itself. Cars, originally predicted to bring about the development of the decentralized garden city, have actually contributed to the creation of the sprawling cities we inhabit today. Rather than facilitate access to the pastoral suburb, the smog caused by cars and the relocation of industry onto cheaper land outside the city have brought about the degradation of massive quantities of once-arable land. Significantly, promised funding of physical road systems has been cut, thereby obstructing actual driving even as massive infrastructural funding has been allocated to electronic networks.