London has a cafe called Cyberia that sells a cup of cappuccino for $2.35 -- and for $2.85 half an hour's access to the Internet on one of its 10 computers. Waiters there not only pour the coffee but also provide technical expertise for ``newbies'' who are making their first foray into the Net.
The Japanese call it ``maruchimedia'' -- multimedia -- and they plan to connect it to nearly every Japanese home by the year 2010. Their carrier: a nationwide supersophisticated fiber-optic system being encouraged by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In Hong Kong 600 of the city's skyscrapers are already wired with fiber optics and rate as ``intelligent buildings.'' The colony's 6 million residents are so interconnected that the better restaurants forbid patrons to talk on their cellular telephones while eating.
And in Moscow, browsers at the jampacked Mitino open-air computer market can pick up crateloads of pirated software, state-of-the-art motherboards and warp-speed modems -- and then go home to the frustrating task of trying (often without success) to tie them into computer networks using telephone lines that date from Lenin's day.
Little by little, the world is getting wired. Despite some big bare spots in middle Africa, Mongolia and the real Siberia (as opposed to the Cyberia Cafe), PCs and their attendant modems are knitting together the global village just as Marshall McLuhan predicted. While no country is as well connected as the U.S., with 32 PCs per 100 citizens, Europe and Asia are coming up fast. Among the reasons are the privatization of industry, which is breaking the stranglehold of government telecommunications monopolies, and the recognition by political leaders of the vital importance of getting up to speed on the worldwide Infobahn (as the Europeans prefer to call it).
The global revolution encompasses every instrument of communication, from pagers to cell phones to CD-ROM. The main gauge of change in information delivery is the boom in sales of modems, which are expected to grow at an average rate of 17.2% worldwide (22.4% in Europe alone) between 1994 and 1998, and the expanding reach of the Internet and such commercial operators as CompuServe. ``Sales of CD-ROM drives are doubling and tripling this year,'' says Deborah Monas, an analyst at London's Kagan World Media. The next 10 years are expected to bring a boom that will put much of the developed world on a par with the U.S. Monas predicts that as many as 42.5% of Europe's 153 million TV households will have PCs by 2003 and that 93% of those machines will be equipped with CD-ROM drives. ``The U.S. could reach 57% ((home-PC penetration)) by 2003,'' she says, ``and Britain could catch up to that figure by then. Germany may be even higher.'' In Japan, PC penetration is 8.8 per 100 households and growing, while Singapore's authoritarian leadership has vowed to make that country an ``intelligent island'' by 2000.