As you read this on the Internet, you may be in a cafe or on a train platform surrounded by people engrossed in the digital information pouring out of their Internet-enabled devices. At this point, we are all part of the estimated nearly 300 million Internet users in the U.S.

But in 1994, only 11 million households had computers equipped with modems that could access popular services like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy, as well as — for those who dared — the recently launched and still very mysterious World Wide Web. If you were an Internet user in 1994, when On the Media first addressed the issue, you were in the vast minority.

This was the world in which On the Media host Alex S. Jones, a digital naif, hosted several discussions on how this new “Information Superhighway” might change the way Americans consume media, and how that media might change to accommodate the new interactive platform. The topic was appropriate for On the Media, which regularly questioned how new technologies, from the burgeoning interactive online world to the introduction of lightweight cameras, would change the way news is reported.

One prominent issue the show covered was the generation gap between media members: Many older journalists were uncomfortable posting in online forums and having their words disseminated without copy editors or fact checkers. Who could afford to go online? Who would control access? Who would control content? Would it become a Misinformation Superhighway?

In a sea of doubt, some chose to forge ahead anyway: on the March 27, 1994 show, guest John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and occasional lyricist for The Grateful Dead, discussed how the Deadhead community were trailblazers truckin’ down the Information Superhighway.

Today, when almost everyone has a video camera in their pocket and media figures, politicians, and other public figures leverage the immediacy of social media to create and communicate with their often disparate audiences, it is fun to look back to the time when we were all stuck on the entrance ramp, merging onto the Information Superhighway without much of a map, let alone a GPS.