Living at Light Speed:: Your Survival Guide to Life on the Information Superhighway

Goodman (The Complete HyperCard Handbook) punctures the misconceptions and hype surrounding the ``information superhighway'' in his savvy, levelheaded, valuable guide, part primer and part journalistic report. This much-touted communications network, he notes, is being built by competing commercial interests; far from being a single, all-encompassing system that will allow hook-up of your computer to all digitized knowledge anywhere on the globe, the ``superhighway,'' if fully realized 10 to 15 years from now, will include many different, often overlapping conduits, available on an uneven basis. Critically surveying the Internet, online services, CD-ROMs, interactive multimedia and mobile, hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs) that can link up with a huge variety of services, Goodman warns of potholes and hurdles such as theft, fraud and invasion of privacy. He also explains how consumers, businesses and communities can devise an ``action plan'' to prepare for the unfolding highway. 25,000 first printing. (Feb.)