The online versions of these newspapers brought us a wealth of information. The web provided not only news available online, but also a whole encyclopedia to help us understand them. As readers, we could click on hyperlinks to get maps, biographies, official texts, political and economic data, photographs, and audio and video coverage. We could easily access other articles on the same topic with search engines sorting out articles by date, author, title, or subject. 1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE AND EMPLOYMENT = [Overview] More and more people were using digital technology. Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was named "multimedia convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with employers, unionists, and government representatives from all over the world. Some participants, mostly employers, demonstrated the information society was generating or would generate jobs, whereas other participants, mostly unionists, demonstrated there was a rise in unemployment worldwide, that should be addressed right away through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining, and fair labor rights, including for teleworkers. = [In Depth] As explained in the introduction of the symposium's proceedings: "With the advent of digitalization, technological convergence has been set into motion. Today all forms of information - whether based in text, sound or images - can be converted into bits and bytes for handling by computer. Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitalization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without distinct material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs, rather than simply books and records. (...) Multimedia convergence deserves our attention for reasons which go far beyond the entertainment, mass media and telecommunications industries. The technological revolution which has made multimedia convergence possible will continue apace, creating new configurations among an ever-widening range of industries. The digitalization of information processing and delivery is transforming the way financial systems operate, the way enterprises exchange information internally and externally, and the way individuals work in an increasingly electronic environment."