While distance education can be traced to correspondence courses that in the 19th and 20th centuries relied on mail services to transmit communications between student and teacher, it is the advent of computers networked via the Internet that has dramatically affected the character of distance education. For the purposes of this paper, distance…

The historic development of the cable phenomenon is traced through industry rhetoric that promised a multitude of services and "voices" in exchange for benign regulations. The current rhetoric of the "wired nation's" latest entrant into the broadband information delivery business--the telcos--also is examined in order to assess…

Struggles over educational access to new communications technologies in the age of U.S. radio and television provide insights into current struggles of educational access to the "information superhighway." Findings from an historical analysis of these earlier periods show that educational access to new communications technologies is…