For many people, their need for resources is minimal, they have relatively few people to communicate with and they can hardly keep up with the information they already have access too, far less more facts and figures and background data. I suppose what we are looking at here is the groundwork of what might be called a 'correction of expectations' rather than a collapse, as people begin to find out what they can and cannot expect from the Internet. This correction is not going to be limited to consumers. It is going to affect, to varying degrees, all those companies who have thrown rather alarming sums of money at the concept of the Internet and should be finding out right about now that lots of it isn't going to be coming back. The hype, smoke and mirrors surrounding the net has fixated for a long time on the interface, the great looking web pages, the movie clips and pictures of skimpily clad young ladies but few people have been able to get a hang of the Web's lasting asset, the foundation on which it was built - information.
Information is an awfully difficult product to make money with.
Most people actually have all the information they need, so selling them more of it requires considerable sleight of hand. The repackaging of encyclopedias on multimedia CD ROM is the most obvious and elegant example of the trend but it also points up the problem. Well, you can sell a lot of them. Microsoft's Encarta, a CD ROM based encyclopaedia, now sells more copies than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The ability to find information is not a desire that most people have in great abundance, though the web offers it to a degree unheard of in history with content ranging from the obvious to the arcane.