Imagine five years from now, and this newspaper looks and feels pretty much the way it does now. But something strange is happening. The share prices on page four keep updating themselves, changing right there on the page. Leave it lying round until lunchtime and the front page photo might morph into another shot, snapped at midday. The stories too.

Perhaps Mr Nicholas Negroponte, who envisions all of this, is some class of Star Trek scriptwriter? A harmless fantasist? No such luck; he's the world's leading Digital Age thinker, and back in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he has got an early prototype of the new-look newspaper.

His message to the Irish business community at today's IBEC conference will be straightforward enough: Listen up now, it's time to get with the programme.

Take the publishing industry, he says. The digital age is going to change so many things so fundamentally that we can't even imagine what is in store. The electronic newspaper takes an old idea that people like and have got used to, and adapts it.

"It works by creating these tiny little capsules - thousands and thousands of them per square inch. And each capsule has inside it a little ping-pong ball that's black on one side and white on the other. And you can electronically rotate it," he explains.

"This is actually on a substrate made of pulp, so it looks and feels exactly like paper. Except it's completely re-usable. We also believe we can build into the paper the circuitry for it to be basically a radio, so we can receive the information electronically, so as you're reading the paper the words and the numbers can change."

The current prototype works as re-usable paper; when you've finished reading the news you put it back into the printer, it erases what was there and prints a new sheet. There's no ink, because of the tiny, rotating ping-pong balls.

"The second form is where you do this electronically, so on the piece of paper there is a grid like on a laptop computer, which is laid down with transparent ink, and that allows you to rotate these little balls as a display. And then if we do that cheaply enough, then you could bind several hundred of these together and make something that literally looks like a book," he says.

It can have a leather cover, and a plug in the back of it.

"You plug it in, read it, take it wherever you want to take it. When you're finished you plug it in again and it erases the content of the book and it writes the next book."

"We have a working prototype of reusable paper today. We can demonstrate that today. Binding them together and making them into a book; that's probably going to take maybe a year to have a working prototype. And to make it into a radio turns out to be easy, so that would happen at the same time."

From prototype to a workable, manufacturable product, however, sometimes takes five, six, even seven years, he adds.

In many other sectors, change is not so much creeping up as lurching like a rugby prop forward headed for the line. Mr Negoponte, who spends most of the year travelling, fears that Europe could find itself on the unfortunate, opposing team.

"France, Germany and to a lesser extent Italy are in deep trouble. Partly because of their telecommunication companies have been monopolies and charge too much for local telephone calls."

Culturally too, Europeans must change, become less centralised and hierarchical in their approach, he says.

"What they can do to get their act together fast is to make sure that kids - five, six, seven years old - have really excellent access to the digital world. I've been saying this to people for 20 years, and the common response was, and still is, `We shouldn't be doing that because it's going to take 20 years for them to become productive members of society.'

"Well, those kids that I was arguing about 20 years ago are now 26 years old! So let's get moving, and just do it! And that would have a bigger effect than anything else they could do, in France and Germany."

He is particularly critical of telephone companies - like Telecom Eireann - that charge per unit for local calls.

"Local calls should be a fixed fee, like a subscription, for as much as you want. And that's very, very important. And even phone companies who aren't accustomed to that should at least offer it to their customers."

In this way, families and businesses could log on the Internet, permanently.

"There's no reason to disconnect. If you look at the way cable modems or even ISDN lines work, it really doesn't disconnect. You don't need to be shipping bits back and forth all the time."

The world's legislators have to rapidly get their act together, and create global laws to deal with the world-wide nature of the digital age, he adds.

And if governments are serious about social cohesion, bringing up all the boats with the tide, they will have to insist - just as they did when the postal service was invented - on universal service. People in commercially non-viable, out-of-the-way areas must have access to the digital world.

"Whether it happens through incentives, subsidies, direct financing by the government depends on your culture. But somebody has to make absolutely sure that the difficult connections are made."

Because comparatively little business - perhaps a few billion dollars a year - is now done on the Internet, he believes most business people still underestimate how much commerce could go on-line, or how fast.

"The amount of income that will be done on the Net really could hit a trillion dollars by the year 2000. What needs to happen, and what could happen, are three things. There's got to be better security, it's got to be much much easier to use, and there have to be reliable payment systems."

Perhaps, he says, the main problem is the software, and Microsoft, as the biggest producer, has to take most of the rap. It makes, he says, not so much software as geekware.

"It's one geek writing for another geek. It has got to change, and people really should complain."