Europe and the Info Age
Ideas
When I designed a global hypertext system and decided to call it World Wide Web, I was pretty much a European — an Englishman living at times in France, at times in Switzerland, while working at cern, the physics lab that straddles the Franco-Swiss border at Geneva. Cern is a great meeting place of bright, excited people from many countries, an intellectual and cultural melting pot beyond compare. Therefore I already belonged to a number of different overlapping communities. I was a member of the international community of high-energy physics and also of the global community of the strange, informal, tolerant and predominantly technical people who sent news articles and electronic mail over the linked computer systems known as the Internet. Neither of these communities was related to geographical borders. Since then, the spread of the Web has left many people asking whether in a few years the geographical boundaries of entities like Europe will be irrelevant, and if they are, what will be left. Will Europe survive the information age? Will it become an informational annex of the U.S.?
This leads to some fundamental questions as to what it will be like to exist on this earth when we all have access to the network. Predictions range from the horrible to the idyllic, and sometimes the difference between the two is a matter of point of view. The Web has rushed through the U.S. in a way that it cannot through Europe. The heat of excitement about the content already on the Web fuels the pouring of greater and greater resources into providing more content, more facilities, better organization and cataloging. There is a vicious circle, in that the more interesting content there is on the Web, the more incentive for readers to get connected; similarly, the more people browsing, the more incentive there is for people to put public content onto the Web. In the U.S. this happens very quickly, as each morsel of information is available to anyone throughout that largely common-language, common-currency bloc that is (in oversimplification) the U.S. There is an incredible economy of scale.
Europe, however, has firebreaks between its cultures: disparate languages, history, institutions, even long-nurtured antagonisms. The explosion of servers and readers exists, but it has moved more slowly. If you publish something on the Web on the local breeding grounds of the gerbil, you will attract gerbil fanciers only of your own language.
If you start a discussion on the delights of Real Ale, the wine drinkers farther south won't contribute to your audience. Add to this the historical facts that the Internet was invented in the U.S. and that in European states telecommunications monopolies have manacled the development of communications, and it is not surprising that Europe seems to be a few years behind the U.S.
Perhaps there are things that European states can do to make things happen faster. The entrepreneurial public should learn that in the Web age, if you wait for government seed funding for a project, you will probably be too late. If it is a good idea, just do it. But there are still things governments can help with. Telecommunications monopolies cannot fall too soon. For the future, governments should not rest on their laurels but should strongly fund pure research, especially in multicultural labs such as cern. For the present, the transatlantic public Internet is overloaded: access is slow to unusable. For Europe to hang together in cyberspace, it must have good international links within and to the U.S. If market forces are not paying for this, it is up to governments to step in and fix it. Once they do, usage will soar.
This raises the specter of U.S. informational domination. Yes, a lot of people in Europe usually browse the U.S., as that is where most of the content is. To be frightened by this would be to give up and imagine that once Europe has caught on to the Web, it will have nothing to say for itself, nothing to create, no culture to celebrate. If you think that, stop reading, stop thinking.
In Europe we have a challenge to communicate more between cultures. The great thing, of course, is that if one does go to the effort of bridging the gaps, the rewards are so much greater. The Web removes the geographical impediment to mixing — but will the cultural barriers survive? Will we end up with a global mono-culture or a mix of cyberspace meeting places of unlimited variety? To answer these questions, we have to imagine a European household of the future. Let's suppose we end up with screens everywhere. We have a big screen in the living room, a small one on a bracket on the kitchen wall, and pocket-size ones that, like ball-point pens, are always available, no matter how many you lose. Each provides a window onto the Web.
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.