Chapter 7
- where social processes have become so dependent on this information and the information infrastructure that citizens who are not connected to this information system cannot fully participate in the functioning of the society.
TIM McKENNA (Geneva)
#Thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux
*Interview of October 17, 2000
= What exactly do you do professionally?
I am a mathematics teacher and currently I am taking time off to earn a master's degree in telecommunications management.
= What exactly do you do on the Internet?
I use the Internet primarily for research.
= How do you see the future?
I hope to see the Internet become more of a tool for accessing news and media that is not controlled by large corporate accounts.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the intellectual property thinks that she owns what she has created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case of book). The business community has not found a new way to add value to intellectual property. Consumers don't think very abstractly. When they download songs for example they are simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The music and publishing industry need to find ways to give consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual property.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
When software gets good enough for people to chat or talk on the Web in real time in different languages, then we will see whole a new world appear before us. Scientists, political activists, businesses and many more groups will be able to communicate immediately without having to go through mediators or translators.
= How much do you still work with paper? Will there still be a place for paper in the future?
Paper still plays a vital role in my life. Reading is a matter of cultural pride for me. My background is Irish (Tim is a US citizen). To paraphrase Thomas Cahil, spirituality has always been closely connected with literacy in Ireland. I would miss reading and reading from a screen is too burdensome to the eyes.
= What do you think about e-books?
I don't think that they have the right appeal for lovers of books. The Internet is great for information. Books are not information. People that love books have a relationship with their books. They reread them, write in them, confer with them. Just as cyber sex will never replace the love of a woman, e-books will never be a vehicle for beautiful prose.
= What do you suggest to give blind and partially-sighted people easier access to the Web?
Software companies need to develop voice activated software with the blind in mind when it comes to quality and the broad consumer market when it comes to profitabilty. It will never be profitable and affordable for the blind to have technology catered to them. However, there are countless examples of technologies that are developed with the less abled in mind and that have wide appeal with the masses.
= What is your definition of cyberspace?
Cyberspace to me is the distance that is bridged when individuals use technology to connect, either by sharing information or chatting. To say that one exists in cyberspace is really to say that he has eliminated distance as a barrier to connecting with people and ideas.
= And your definition of the information society?
The information society to me is the tangible form of Jung's collective consciousness. Most of the information resides in the subconsciousness but browsing technology has made the information more retrievable which in turn allows us greater self knowledge both as individuals and as human beings.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
My best experience with the Internet is using e-mail to stay in touch with friends.
= And your worst experience?
My worst experience was learning how to use it before technology surpassed my ineptitude.
MICHAEL MARTIN (Berkeley, California)
#Founder and president of Travlang, a site dedicated both to travel and languages
Michael Martin created a Foreign Languages for Travelers section on his university website in 1994 when he was a physics student in New York. A year later, after its dizzying growth, he launched Travlang, a site that quickly became a major portal for travel and languages and won a best travel site award in 1997. Martin, now an experimental physics researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, sold it to GourmetMarket.com in February 1999, who sold it to iiGroup in January 2000. By July 2000, the site was pulling in two million visitors a month.
Travlang has two main sections. Foreign Languages for Travelers allows you to learn 70 different languages on the Web. Translating Dictionaries links to free dictionaries in Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. You can also book your hotel, car or plane ticket, look up exchange rates and browse 7,000 other language and travel sites.
*Interview of August 25, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
Well, certainly we've made a little business of our website! The Internet is really a great tool for communicating with people you wouldn't have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. I truly enjoy the global collaboration that has made our Foreign Languages for Travelers pages possible.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
I think the Web is an ideal place to bring different cultures and people together, and that includes being multilingual. Our Travlang site is so popular because of this, and people desire to feel in touch with other parts of the world.
I think computerized full-text translations will become more common, enabling a lot of basic communications with even more people. This will also help bring the Internet more completely to the non-English speaking world.
YOSHI MIKAMI (Fujisawa, Japan)
#Creator of The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet, and co-author of The Multilingual Web Guide
Set up in December 1995 by Yoshi Mikami, The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet (known as Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page) gives for each language a brief history, its features, writing system and character set and keyboard for computer and Internet processing.
Yoshi Mikami is also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of The Multilingual Web Guide, first published in Japanese in August 1997 (O'Reilly Japan, ISBN 4-900900-23-0), and translated into English, French and German.
*Interview of December 17, 1998
= What is your experience with languages?
My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the US and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese and American English. I was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the Web The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating multilingual web pages, which was published in August 1997 as The Multilingual Web Guide, in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and multilingual pages on the Internet, not a simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan are written in Japanese.
JOHN MARK OCKERBLOOM (Pennsylvania)
#Founder of The On-Line Books Page, listing freely-available online books
The On-Line Books Page lists over 12,000 freely-available online books in English. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, who the same year started the website of the CMU CS (Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science). In 1998, John graduated from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) with a Ph.D. in computer science. He has now moved to Penn (University of Pennsylvania), where he works with the library and the computer science department doing digital library research and development. The On-Line Books Page also joined Penn's digital library, and John hopes it can be greatly expanded and upgraded while being integrated with other digital library resources.
*Interview of September 2, 1998
= How did your website begin?
I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993. The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made Web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)
After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the Net. So that's how my index got started.
I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The On-Line Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the Net had for making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some form or another.
= How do you see the future?
I am very excited about the potential of the Internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the Net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer.
*Interview of August 5, 1999
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
I'm not sure which debate you have in mind. But I think it's important for people on the Web to understand that copyright is a social contract that's designed for the public good -- where the public includes both authors and readers.
This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the US now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the "database copyright" proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. I find it much harder to sympathize with MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) head Jack Valenti's plea to stop copying of copyrighted movies when I know that if he had his way, *no* movie would ever enter the public domain. (Mary Bono mentioned this wish of his in Congress last year.)
If media companies are seen to try to lock up everything that they can get away with, I don't find it surprising that some consumers react by putting on-line anything *they* can get away with. Unfortunately, doing that in turn takes away the legitimate rights of authors.
How to practically solve this? Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it's too often ends up being ("big money vs. rogue pirates") we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations.
CAOIMHIN O DONNAILE (Island of Skye, Scotland)
#Maintains European Minority Languages on the main site with information on Scottish Gaelic
Maintained on the site of the college Sabhal Mór Ostaig by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family.
*Interview of August 18, 1998
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
I see four main points:
- The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of English as a world language.
- The Internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself.
- The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this.
- The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual.
*Interview of January 15, 2000
= What exactly do you do professionally?
I teach computing (through the Gaelic language) at a college on the island of Skye in Scotland. I maintain the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
I haven't been following the debate, but I think the duration of copyright is far too long. Other than that I think that copyright should be respected in general.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
There is a danger that English will take over the world because of the spread of the Internet. However, if people are keen to maintain other languages, then the Internet will help with this.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
[Private matters.]
= And your worst experience?
I don't have any really bad experiences with the Internet. Just the usual - spam, hackers, but nothing really bad.
*Interview of May 31st, 2001
= What has happened since our last interview?
There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at the Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, Gaelic online terminology database. More hits on our web site. More use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now available continuously worldwide via the Internet. Major project has been translation the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of any size available in Gaelic.
= Do you have anything to add to your previous answers?
I would emphasise the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the Internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the Internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the Internet will be a tremendous help.
= How much do you still work with paper?
I work with paper a lot, but far less than with computer delivered information. I write about 2.000 e-mails per year, compared to about 100 letters and about 500 phone calls and about 15 faxes.
= Will there still be a place for paper in the future?
Yes, there will still be a place for paper for a long long time to come, but its share will continue to decline compared to computer-delivered information.
= What do you think about e-books?
I don't know much about what e-books are. WWW is the really important thing.
JACQUES PATAILLOT (Paris)
#Management Consultant with the firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
*Interview of January 26, 2000 (original interview in French)
= Can you tell us about your company's website?
The Ernst & Young France website was created in 1998. It started out as just an advertisement for the firm and its activities and grew naturally from there.
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
The Internet changed (and changes) our professional life in two ways:
- It provides our consultants with data about present and possible clients. These are the communication/information aspects.
- The Internet has generated new needs among firms, so management consultancies have and are developing e-commerce solutions such as eprocurement, efulfilment, etc. A whole new range of activities is available. This will revolutionise the world of consulting and major investments are being made to develop such e-solutions.
= How do you see the future?
In the short term, as consultants, we'll also be affected by the growth of online services through the Internet. For some consulting, subject matter experts can answer clients and possible clients through the Web. We're moving towards online consulting.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
The Internet was conceived as an "open world", so copyright is a tricky probem. I can't see much of a solution.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Unfortunately, a multilingual Internet is quite unlikely. English is too strong, and the duplication of texts and data isn't feasible.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
When I can quickly find the information I'm looking for.
= And your worst experience?
The opposite situation -- getting lost when I'm looking for something.
PETER RAGGETT (Paris)
#Head of the Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) of the OECD (Organisation for Economic and Co-operation Development)
"The OECD groups 29 member countries in an organisation that, most importantly, provides governments a setting in which to discuss, develop and perfect economic and social policy. They compare experiences, seek answers to common problems and work to co-ordinate domestic and international policies that increasingly in today's globalised world must form a web of even practice across nations. (...) The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The core of original members has expanded from Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to membership." (extract of the website)
The Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) is charged with providing information to agents of the OECD in support of their research work. It has about 60,000 monographs and about 2,500 periodical titles in its collections. The CDI also provides information in electronic format from databases, CD-ROMs and the Internet.
Peter Raggett, the Head of the CDI, has been a professional librarian for nearly twenty years, fist working in UK government libraries and now at the OECD since 1994. He has been working with the Internet since 1996. He is in charge of the CDI Intranet pages, which are one of the chief sources of information for OECD personnel.
*Interview of June 18, 1998
= What exactly do you do on the Internet?
I have to filter the information for library users which means that I must know the sites and the links that they have. I chose several hundred sites to allow access to them from the OECD Intranet and these sites are part of the virtual reference desk which the library has made available to the Organisations's staff. As well as these links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and web sites corresponding to different ongoing research projects at the OECD, network access to CD-ROMs and a monthly list of new titles. The library catalogue will soon be available on the Intranet.
= How do you see the future?
The Internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the Internet. Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on the Internet.
I expect that there will be an expansion in Internet use for education and research. This means that libraries will have to create virtual libraries where students can follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the world.
Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a virtual librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will contact me by e-mail, telephone or fax and I will do the research and send them the results electronically.
*Interview of August 4, 1999
= What has happened since our first interview?
Our Intranet site will be completely renovated by the end of the year, as we will be putting the library catalogue on the Intranet. This will allow our users to access the catalogue across our Intranet. The catalogue will be Z39.50 compliant.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
The copyright question is still very unclear. Publishers naturally want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and end-users want to be able download immediately full text of articles. At the moment each publisher seems to have its own policy for access to electronic versions and they would benefit from having some kind of homogenous policy, preferably allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
I think it is incumbent on European organisations and businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if resources permit. In this age of globalisation and electronic commerce, businesses are finding that they are doing business across many countries. Allowing French, German, Japanese speakers to easily read one's web site as well as English speakers will give a business a competitive edge in the domain of electronic trading.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
Finding within 10 minutes articles and information on a professor who was visiting the Organisation.
= And your worst experience?
Connection problems and slow transfer of data.
*Interview of July 31, 2000
= What has happened since our last interview?
The catalogue was mounted onto our Intranet pages in October 1999. This allows all OECD agents to search the CDI's catalogue easily from their own offices.
= How much do you still work with paper?
We are still providing photocopies of periodical articles, although our use of paper has diminished slightly, due to the availability of full text articles on the Internet in PDF format. Our loans of monographs has not decreased since the advent of the Internet.
= Will there still be a place for paper in the future?
I think that there will still be a place for some use of paper despite the advent of electronic books. The use of paper will lessen as people get more and more used to electronic books.
= What do you think about e-books?