Aboutthebook The success of the information society The rapid progress
of the "information society" in the past decade has been made possible
by the removal of many technical barriers. Producing, storing, and
transporting information in large quantities are no longer signi?cant
problems. Producing on-line, digitized information is no longer a
problem. Ever more of our commercial, scienti?c and personal information
exchanges happen on-line in digital form. In the professional domain,
near 100% of all o?ce documents
areproducedindigitalform(evenifafterwardstheyaredistributedinpaper
form), large parts of the scienti?c discourse are now taking place in
digital form (with physics, computer science and astronomy taking a
leading role). In the public domain, newspapers are available on-line,
an increasing number of radio and television stations o?er their
material on-line in streaming form and e-government is an important
theme for public administration. Even in the personal area, information
is rapidly moving on-line: sales of digital cameras are now higher then
for analogue cameras, e-mail and on-line chat have become important
channels for maintaining social relations and for personal entertainment
the digital DVD is rapidly replacing the analogue video tape. Compact
disk (itself already digital) is under serious pressure from on-line
music in MP3 format from a variety of sources. In short: p-
ductionofon-lineinformationisnowthenorminvirtuallyallareasofourlife.
Storing such information in the required volumes is also no longer a
problem.
