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Greenberg, S. (1994)
Real Time Groupware on the Information Highway. In Proceedings of the Canadian Multimedia Conference. (Calgary, Canada), Nov 7-9.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).

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Abstract.
When we envisage the information highway and what it can be used for, we usually begin with its physical metaphor. We see it as an electronic thoroughfare that lets us travel through distributed digital libraries – such as the World Wide Web – and, when we request it, that lets us ship the information within these libraries from place to place. We also see it as a carrier for delivering our electronic messages, such as email and bulletin board postings.

The highway metaphor unfortunately blinds us to other ways that we can use this system. While travel on physical highways is slow, travel on the high-speed networks that underpin the electronic highway is nearly instantaneous. Because of this speed, the “highway” becomes an ideal medium for supporting real time communication and collaboration between people located anywhere in the world. The point of this paper is to introduce two important ways the information highway can support such collaborations: through groupware supporting both real time distributed meetings and casual interaction.