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199 lines
12 KiB
199 lines
12 KiB
<HTML>
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<HEAD>
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<META name="Author" content="Tim Berners-Lee">
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<META name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/2.01Gold (Win32)">
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<TITLE>The Future of the Web and Europe</TITLE>
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</HEAD>
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<BODY BGCOLOR="#fef3ba">
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<H1>
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The Web; Europe and the US; Diversity and Harmony
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</H1>
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<P>
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Draft for a Time International article on the Web, and the question of whether
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Europe will necessarily be dominated by the US. June 1996. Edited a
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bit in 1997. The Time International article was seperately edited and is
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therefore different.
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<P>
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<HR>
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<P>
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<I>Ok, so the first thing you imagine is that the future of networking in
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Europe is going to be much like that in the US, only a few years behind.
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and there's plenty of reasons to think that. It's the Anglophone market block
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of North America which gives the US launch of anything a jump start on the
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a Eurolaunch. Its the cultural deference that the US is a nation of doers
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rather than talkers. There's the lack of entrepreneurial spirit, which in
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Europe sometimes we believe left for good on the Santa Maria and the
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Mayflower.</I> <I>Gimme a break...</I>
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<P>
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<HR>
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<P>
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<P>
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When I designed a global hypertext system, and decided for better or
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worse to call it "World Wide Web", I was pretty much a European - an
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Englishman working in Switzerland and living alternatelly in France and
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Switzerland. I belonged to a number of different overlapping communities.
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I was also a member of the international community of high energy physics,
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and of another community, the global internet community of the strange, informal,
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tolerant and predominantly technical people who sent news articles and electronic
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mail over the Internet. Neither of these communities were related to geographical
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borders. Since then, the spread of the WWW has left many people asking whether
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in a few years the geographical boundaries will be completely irrelevant,
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and if they are, what will be left.
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<P>
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This leads to some fundamental questions as to what it will be like to exist
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on this earth when we all have access to the network. Things are changing
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very rapidly, and any doubts we have about the developed world being online
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are rapidly disappearing. Predictions of the effect on society range from
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the horrific to the idyllic, and sometimes the difference between the those
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two is a matter of point of view. I'll consider some worries about that far
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off future, but first let's think abut the next few years.
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<P>
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The Web has rushed through the United States like a forest fire in a way
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it cannot in Europe. The heat of excitement in the content already on the
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web fuels the pouring of greater and greater resources into providing more
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content, more facilities, better organization and cataloging. The spread
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of servers fuels the spread of the clients and vice-versa, as each morsel
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of information, no matter how esoteric, is available to anyone who may be
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interested in it throughout that largely mono-language monoculture which
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is, (in broad oversimplification typical of a European!), the United States.
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There is an incredible economy of scale.
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<P>
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Europe, however has firebreaks between its cultures. The vicious circle of
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growing server deployment and readership exists, but it happens slower. If
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you put up a web page on, say, the local breeding grounds of the gerbil,
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you will attract gerbil fanciers only of your on language. If you start a
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discussion on the delights of Real Ale, the wine-drinkers further south won't
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contribute to your audience. Add to this the historical fact that the Internet
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was invented in the US, and that in European states in the past an emphasis
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on an independent set of protocols has manacled the development of
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communications, it is not surprising that Europe seems to be following the
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US a few years behind.
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<P>
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That is not to say there are not a lot of things which European states can
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do individually and collectively to make things happen faster. Allowing a
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stiff open competition for getting Internet packets into and out of people's
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homes as cheaply and efficiently as possible is part of it. Telecommunication
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monopolies cannot fall too soon. Although in the US the market seems to be
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set for funding the long distance links indirectly through individual
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subscriptions, there is no evidence to me that this is working for international
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traffic. When people ask whether there is a possibility that the Internet
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effectively grind to a halt under the load, I answer that it already has.
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The transatlantic public Internet is overloaded to an appalling extent: access
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is slow to unusable. In the long term, many argue that the problem of bandwidth
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is in the "last mile", from the nearest exchange (sorry, the nearest Internet
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router) to your home. In the short term, though, I am quite happy to
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browse at 28.8kB if only my share of the long distance links can keep up.
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For Europe as an entity to hang together in cyberspace, it must have good
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international links within and to the US. If market forces are not paying
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for this, then as a non-expert in telecommunications policy I can only
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conclude that it is up to the governments to step in and fix it. Bandwidth
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is one of the simpler things to fix.
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<P>
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If all the saturated international links were suddenly to be upgraded to
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ten times there bandwidth, I am sure they would be saturated again the moment
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folks found out about it. There is a lot of potential use of the web now
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which is just abandoned because it is so excrutiatingly slow. The moment
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that the time it takes to follow a hypertext link is again more like
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a second or two, use will soar again. And if you believe Europe getting on
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line, this is what you are after.
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<P>
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Yes, a lot of people in Europe mostly browse the US, as that is where most
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of the content is. If anyone should think that slowing down transatlantic
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traffic is a solution to this, let them think again. To do so would be to
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give up and imagine that once Europe has caught on, that it will have nothing
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to say for itself, nothing to create, no culture to put across and celebrate.
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If you think that, stop reading, stop thinking.
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<P>
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So in Europe we have a challenge to communicate more between cultures. The
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great thing, of course, is that if one does go to the effort of bridging
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the gaps, the rewards are so much greater. The web removes the geographical
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impediment to mixing - but will the cultural barriers survive? Will we end
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up with a global monoculture, or a mix of cyberspace meeting places of unlimited
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variety? We have to gaze into our crystal ball, imagine a wired European
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household.
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<P>
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Let's suppose we end up with screens everywhere. I call them "screens" rather
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than "computers" or "televisions" because that is primarily what you experience,
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and because the insides of a computer and the insides of a TV will become
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indistinguishable. Imagine we have a big screen in the living room, a small
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portable one on a bracket on the kitchen wall, and enough pocket-sized ones
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that, like ball point pens, no matter how many you lose you can always find
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another one. Each provides a window onto the universal information space,
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the Web, though they differ in the quality and speed of access.
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<BLOCKQUOTE>
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<I>In your (Dutch, say) suburban home, the kitchen screen's preset buttons
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are set to your favourite places: the weather map, the school Parent Reminder
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page, an oldies station and the family's mailboxes. One is set to the web
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site of a small italian town twinned with yours, where you were learning
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some language and art from some net freinds in the rotary club there. Ready
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for a change of culture, you link though to Italy while filling the dishwasher.
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Each of you has been brought up with a different slant on the Renaissance
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painters, and you are fascinated to learn more about the Italian scene.</I>
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<P>
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<I>Suddenly your conversation is interrupted as in skates your eldest,
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with a crowd of friends, He has just reached the age of digtal choice. Your
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rights to select material suitable for his viewing have ended, and he flourishes
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his newfound adultcard with mock carelesness as he authenticates himself
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to the livingroom screen. The preset buttons now all glow with his personal
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choice of gruesome entertainment. A face floats across the screen: te search
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machine has shown him a random one of the 643,768 people world over whose
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personal reading profile is identical to his. Pretty cool figure, he smirks.
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To be on the top of the normal curve you have to surf carefully, and always
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stick to straight media gulch sites. It takes a certain sense to select only
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the places which you can guess the majority of your teen group will be chosing.
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He knows that though he might live in a small town in the Netherlands, he
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is right in the center of the main trend, he feels the strenth of being exactly
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in tune with all his seen and unsen colleagues. And he knows he wears and
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eats exactly as they do.</I>
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<P>
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<I>You feel uneasy about this, and discuss it with your Italian friend. She
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is concerned too, though she has a refreshingly different attitude to the
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problem. Her eldest is just the same, but she is convinced he will be over
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it by the time he's nine. Your offspring are making a headlong dash for the
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oblivion of conformity. But aren't you also quiety mixing your Dutch and
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Italian cultures, and silently htreatening both?</I>
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<P>
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</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P>
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European countries have been studying the pros and cons of sharing or protecting
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their culture for a long time before the Web came along. We have lost Cornish,
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but there is an attempt to preserv French by law. It is reasonable to be
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worried. Most of the structre of our society has been based on geographical
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boundaries of one sort or another. The stability of kingdoms has been
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determined by such geographical constraints such as the time it takes to
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gather troops, or ride to the capital with a warning of incoming invasion.
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A huge amount of the hierarchical structrue of or world is based on the two
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dimensional space which the Web is pulling from under our feet. However,
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my observation of that early Internet culture was that geography-free though
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it was, it ended up dividing into smaller and smaller enclaves of person
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specific interest.
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<P>
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In fact, theer are two equally frightening prospects. On the one hand is
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the descent to the lowest common denominator, often represented by US
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fast food and cartoons, with the loss all that is rich and diverse. On
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the other, is an extreme of diversity. When anyone can filter mail so that
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they can read only mesages from people who think the same weird things as
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themselves, and when what they read on the Web they only find by following
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links from sites of the same strange cult, will they be able to gif themselves
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intoa cultural pothole so deep and so steep that when eventually they physially
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meet a real person on the street, the lack of common understadning will be
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total, and the only fom of communication left will be to shoot them?
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<P>
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The key to avoiding each of these is in our own individual behaviour. The
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univerality of eth web includes the fact that the information space can represent
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anything from ones personal private jottings to a polished global publication.
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We as people can, with or without the web, interact on all scale. We are
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like pixels in a mandelbrot set: we are part of the detail on every level
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of scale. By being involved on every level, we ourselves form the ties
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which wevae th elevels together into a sort of consistency, balancing the
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homogneity and the heterogeneity, the harmony and the diversity. We
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can be involved on a personal, family, town, corporate, state, national,
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union, and international levels. Culture exists at all levels, and we should
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give it a weighted balanced respect at each level. In Europe, there is perhaps
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one more level of culture. Our job of maintaining that balance is just
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that much more difficult, and that much more rewarding.
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<P>
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<ADDRESS>
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(c)TimBL 1996,1997
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</ADDRESS>
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</BODY></HTML>
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