Internet Access: Flat Fee Vs. Pay-per-use :: essays research papers

net in get under ones skin Access Flat Fee vs. Pay-Per-Use      approximately Internet drug users argon either not charged to access information, or suffera low-cost flat fee. The entropy SuperHighway, on the new(prenominal) hand, leave alone liable(predicate) be based upon a pay-per-use model. On a gross level, one might say thatthe payment model for the Internet is closer to that of broadcast (or perhapscable) television while the model for the Information SuperHighway is likely tobe more like that of pay-per-view T.V.     "Pay-per-use" environments affect user access habits. "Flat fee"situations encourage exploration. Users in flat-fee environments navigate by means of webs of information and tend to make serendipitous discoveries. "Pay-per-use" situations give the public the fillip to focus their attention onwhat they know they already want, or to ensure for well-known items previouslyrecommended by others. In "pay-per-use" environments, volume tend to happen moretraditional avenues of discovery, and seldom explore totally unexpected avenues."Pay-per-use" environments dissuade browsing. Imagine how a persons readinghabits would change if they had to pay for each name they looked at in amagazine or newspaper.     Yet legion(predicate) of the most interesting things we learn about or find come fromfollowing unknown routes, bumping into things we werent looking for. (Indeed,Thomas Kuhn makes the claim that, even in the hard sciences, real breakthroughsand interesting discoveries only come from following these illicit routesKuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago University ofChicago Press, 1962).     And people who have to pay each time they use a piece of information arelikely to increasingly rely upon specialists and experts. For example, in asituation where the indorser will have to pay to read each paragraph of mounton Bosnia, s/he is more likely to rely upon sound out Department summaries insteadof paying to become more generally intercommunicate him/herself. And in the 1970s and1980s the library world learned that the inlet of expensive pay-per-usedatabases discouraged individual exploration and introduced the need forintermediaries who specialized in searching techniques.Producers vs. Consumers     On the Internet anyone can be an information provider or an informationconsumer. On the Information SuperHighway most people will be relegated to therole of information consumer.     Because services like "movies-on-demand" will drive the technologicaldevelopment of the Information SuperHighway, movies need for high bandwidthinto the home office and only narrow bandwidth coming back out will likely dominate.(see Besser, Howard. "Movies on Demand May Significantly Change the Internet", publicise of the American Associati on for Information Science, October 1994)Metaphorically, this will be like a ten-lane highway coming into the home andonly a tiny path leading back out (just wide enough to take a credit card number