What will society look like under the evolving institutions of interactive multimedia technologies? Well, if the 1980's were a time for media tycoons, the 1990's will be for the self-styled visionaries. These gurus see a dawning digital age in which the humble television will mutate into a two-way medium for a vast amount of information and entertainment. We can expect to see: movies-on-demand, video games, databases, educational programming, home shopping, telephone services, telebanking, teleconferencing, even the complex simulations of virtual reality. This souped-up television will itself be a powerful computer. This, many believe, will be the world's biggest media group, letting consumers tune into anything, anywhere, anytime.

Teachers and Professors alike share in this technology to plan out their curricular schedules and school calendar. Most will agree that classroom computers seem to have a positive effect on students of the 90's. As schools and universities become more technology driven, there will be an even bigger plea for more multimedia enhancements.

These two announcements signaled the start of a mad multimedia scramble in America, home market to many of the world's biggest media, publishing, telecoms and computer companies, almost all of which have entered the fray. The reasons are simple: greed and fear: greed for new sources of revenue; fear that profits from current businesses may fall as a result of reregulation or cut-throat competition.

e most extraordinary thing about the multimedia boom, is that so many moguls are spending such vast sums to develop digital technologies, for the delivering of programs and services which are still largely hypothetical.

Educational systems of this type, offered by IBM under the product labeled Ultimedia, engage students in an interactive learning experience that mixes color movie, bold graphics, music, voice narration, and text; for instance, the program Columbus allows students to relive the great navigator's voyages and explore the New World as it looked when Columbus first saw it. The ability to control the learning experience makes the student an active rather than a passive learner.

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Approximate Word count = 1226
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)