By the time you read this, Internet2 may be a reality. Yes, that's right. Faster than you can say, "URL Not Found," the Internet has spawned a sequel. Faster! Bigger! Better!
How envious James Cameron must be. The unique subject matter of his movie doesn't make a sequel likely. Yes, he might have made the biggest blockbuster movie of all time, but not even he can make the Titanic float again. Besides, Raise the Titanic! has already been made, way back in 1980. It flopped. Mr. Cameron is known as a visionary who's not stingy with other people's money. It's conceivable that he could decide to remake this turkey and turn it into a megahit by the simple infusion of a hundred million dollars and his own force of personality.
But he'd probably be better off finding other approaches. I even have a suggestion (which I'm willing to part with for, oh, three million dollars)--two words: underwater zombies. That's as far as I'm prepared to go without a written contract. Have Mr. Cameron's people call my people. We'll talk (as soon as I get some people).
But of course, movies are relatively easy to sequelize. Just offer audiences more of the same, and they're generally happy. Sure, there are missteps. For every Terminator 2, there's a Grease 2. For every Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom there's a More American Graffiti. Some sequels actually become franchises, like the James Bond series. Some franchises falter; I don't imagine Batman Some More! will do well. Some franchises are just plain mystifying--the whole Police Academy series, for instance, the Three Ninjas, or The Mighty Ducks.
The Mighty Ducks, in a strange turn of events, entered reality in 1993, when Disney formed an actual hockey team called The Mighty Ducks. So you might say the real world, so to speak, provided its own sequel to a work of imagination--assuming The Mighty Ducks qualifies as a work of imagination, a pretty big assumption.
Come to think of it, the real world spawns many sequels. New York is a sequel to York, New England a sequel to England, and New Mexico a sequel to Arizona. Sports teams are constantly reinventing themselves, to the ever-diminishing enthusiasm of their fans. The professional basketball team the New Orleans Jazz, for instance, became the Utah Jazz. New Orleans and jazz are an easy fit (they go to together like Green Bay and Packers), but Utah and jazz? When I visualize Salt Lake City (which I only do when there's nothing good on cable), its streets are not full of sax-blowing hipsters. Then again, whenever I visualize Anaheim (which I only do when Salt Lake City's URL is Not Found), its streets are not full of hockey players named for bland water fowl either.
Face it. Reality can be jarring. No wonder we're leaping into cyberspace with both feet--both Internets anyway.
The "next-generation Internet" is receiving $500 million in free fiber-optic capacity and equipment from Qwest Communications, Cisco Systems, and Britain's Northern Telecom. Announcing the formation of this new Internet at a press conference last spring, Vice President Gore posed with 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Holding a fiber-optic line the size of a thread (according to the San Francisco Chronicle), "Gore said the new technology--1,000 times faster than the current Internet--could transmit the entire set in under a second."
One of the curiosities about the Internet (and Internet2) is that the Encyclopedia Britannica has become a basic unit of measurement. What the cubit was to Noah, what a hundred million dollars is to James Cameron, so the Encyclopedia Britannica is to Internet developers. Your bandwidth is measured by how fast you can transmit the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Oxford English Dictionary just won't do. It's got to be the Encyclopedia Britannica or nothing. And if it takes more than a second, forget about it. Apparently end users everywhere are downloading Britannicas, drumming their fingers, and shouting, "Come on! Come on! It's been forty milliseconds, and you haven't even got to axolotl yet!"
We won't be content until we receive the Encyclopedia Britannica before it's been sent. By Internet27, I predict this will be possible. We'll have a thousand sets of reference books cluttering up our servers, but our fiber optic threads will be so skinny we'll need microscopes to find them.
This could spill over into all walks of life. Professional athletes' salaries could be measured by thesauruses, concordances, and almanacs rather than dollars. Your admission ticket to a theme park could be volumes A through K. For all we know, James Cameron's next blockbuster could be Britannic!
Unless Internet2 flops, of course, or hits a virtual iceberg. In that case, we may all have to go back to the Yellow Pages. Come to think of it, the Yellow Pages might not be a bad unit of measurement. How fast can I get it? Come on, I haven't got all minute!
Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco, where residents are called San Franciscans.
Residents of Anaheim are called Anaheimers. Residents of Salt Lake City are called Mormons,
by and large. You can reach him via email at mkessler@ix.netcom.com.