World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee, photographed in 1996
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In your Dutch home the kitchen screen's preset buttons may be set to your favorite info places: the weather map, the school parent's reminder page, an oldies video station and the family's E-mailboxes. One is set to the Website of an Italian town twinned with yours, where you are learning language and art from your Net friend Antonia.
Ready for a change of culture, you link through to Italy while filling the dishwasher. Meanwhile, in comes your eldest son. He has just reached the age of digital choice. Your rights to select sites suitable for his viewing have ended, and he flourishes his newly won Netcard with studied carelessness as he punches a password into the living-room screen. It now glows with his personal choice of gruesome entertainment. A face floats across the screen: the search machine has shown him a random selection of the 643,768 people around the world whose personal reading profile is identical to his own. Pretty cool number, he smirks. For your son the Web is the gateway not to diversity but to conformity. To be on the top of the normal curve, a kid his age has to surf the Web carefully, always sticking to the popular output of the big media companies. It takes a certain sensibility — a cybersense of hipness — to select only the places that he can guess the majority of his teen group will be choosing at the same time. He knows that though he might live in a small town in the Netherlands, he is right in the center of the main trend; he feels the strength of being exactly in tune with all his seen and unseen colleagues. And he knows he wears the same sort of clothes and eats exactly what they do.
As a parent, you feel uneasy about his conforming to the norms not of the village but of the global village. You discuss it by video over the dishes. Antonia is concerned too, though she has a refreshingly different attitude. Her carefree optimism balances your own tendency to worry, just as the clear Tuscan sky behind her puts the steadily falling Dutch rain into perspective. You wonder how people remained sane before the Internet.
But such crystal-ball gazing is not wise now. Not only are things changing, but the pace of change is changing as well. Seriously. Before the Internet, it took only a few days to have new software shipped and installed on a computer. With the Web as it currently exists, it takes only a click of the computer mouse. With the development of automatic-download software and "agent" programs roaming the Net all by themselves, your computer in the future may change most of its software without your even asking. But the essential question of whether the Net will heighten or crush Europe's diversity of culture still remains.
European countries had been studying the pros and cons of sharing or protecting their culture for a long time before the Web came along. We have lost the use of Cornish, but French is being preserved by law. It is reasonable for European governments to be worried. Our society's structure has been based mostly on geographic boundaries, and its stability determined by geographic constraints, such as the time it takes to mobilize troops or ride to the capital with a warning of impending invasion. That may be gone, but my observation of early Internet culture was that though geography free, it ended up dividing into smaller enclaves of personal specific interest.
The same seems to be true of the web. Why so? On the Web, unlike with TV and junk mail, what you see is really up to you. People complain that there is so much "junk" out there, but they are just referring to the things that others like but they don't. If you don't like your browser's preset starting places, turn them off or change them. Instead, collect sites you approve of, your "bookmarks" in cyberspace. Increasingly, you will be able to put your own material on the Web. So write your own hypertext, if you think you can do better. Make links only to things you respect. We are, and Europe will be, the choices we make. If you want the Web to be European, or rich in early choral music, make it so. Remember, no one else will be forced to read your work. But you will have done your part to preserve and state what you think is important. Let diversity thrive. When the great richness of peoples that is Europe is brought into contact with itself through the Web, the result should be tolerance, progress and a whole lot of fun.