What are the impacts of a world where individuals have easy access to incredible richness of information resources, all of which are no farther away than the nearest computer screen? How will people use this information effectively and responsibly?

Prior democratic movements have always struggled with the tension between its use to elevate the masses or the debasing of the movement to fit popular tastes. For example, the push for universal literacy grew out of the desire for everyone to read the Bible and other enlightening literature; yet the National Enquirer remains the most popular national journal. Similarly, does universal suffrage lead to elections that select the best candidate, or demagogues who can appeal to the masses?

Both trends are already visible within the Worldwide Web. Web searches can yield carefully researched and written stories, but also blind speculation by untrained amateurs or hucksters pitching their peculiar world view.

Quite simply, is there a limited quantity of high-quality information? If so, information-rich worlds may end up adding more junk or "noise" than useful material. This parallels the experience of animal breeders. When a breed becomes highly popular, the overall quality deteriorates because the number of mediocre quality animals from amateur breeders grows much faster than the smaller group of serious breeders deeply concerned for maintaining the breed quality.

Information-rich worlds call for new research strategies. The tradition of exhaustive literature searches becomes becomes hopelessly obsolete when searches produce thousands of articles.

Information-rich worlds are changing the balance of power in the commercial transactions between merchant and customer.