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As captivating a term as it might be, the associations that the words information superhighway suggest aren't related to knowledge, nor to any sort of community building activity. To my dismay I devote a relatively substantial part of my day to travelling on the freeway. Though I ordinarily succeed in filling up my car with other people who have to get to Tel Aviv, on the whole each car that I see on the way carries one, or at the most two people. Perhaps being part of a traffic jam can be a community building experience (shades of Woodstock), but those are hardly the ideal conditions for a positive relationship.

And what about knowledge? We drive on the freeway to get to our destination. Arriving is the important thing, and taking in the sights along the way is hardly an important factor in the trip. If we're in a traffic jam we're hardly in the mood for making a coherent whole of the the bits and pieces of information that we pass along the way, and if the road is open, we're not in a position to do so - the bits and pieces go by too quickly to do much with them. Constructing knowledge out of bits of information demands time. Speeding along the information superhighway may be a means of arriving at a destination, but I doubt that the destination has much to do with knowledge.
 

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