Highways of the mind: The haunting of the superhighway from the World's Fair to the World Wide Web

This comment, aimed at the changing ways in which students must learn to approach media culture, pointed out that just as the Napoleonic Wars tasked engineers to consider new ways to build highway infrastructure, so now must educators create new infrastructures for learning. "Highways of the mind" thus refer just as much to ways of organizing thinking and subjectivity as they do to ways of organizing and transporting goods and people. This dissertation argues that one reason the highway remains so compelling as a cultural artifact is that it highlights the stakes involved in a more abstract, ongoing process: the tension between hierarchical and nodal modes of material and informational organization.

The highway, both as a hierarchically-conceived means of transporting goods and people, and a nodal-network designed to compensate for missing elements of itself, can thus be seen as an artifact which embodies the ongoing restructuring of materials and ideologies which constitutes cultural change.