Communicating Cyberspace and Virtual Reality

Raoul Germain Blé

En très peu de temps, les nouvelles technologies de la communication et l’information sont devenues des outils incontournables des échanges internationaux. Dans ce sens l’internet est en train de bouleverser le mode de fonctionnement des sociétés tant au plan intérieur qu’extérieur. Au départ, réservé aux pays riches, équipés en infrastructures indispensables à sa réalisation, le réseau des réseaux occupe aujourd’hui progressivement toute la planète. Son succès repose en sa capacité d’établir des échanges à travers des informations rapides dont les pays et les individus pourraient profiter.

Tara Brabazon

With most critical and historical interpretations of the Internet trapped between the ideologies of technophilia and progress, little attention is being placed on the digital future of the analogue past. This paper evaluates contemporary notions of cataloguing, preservation and memory. Most stress is placed on how the passions and enthusiasm of popular culture are tempered through digitisation.

Thomas W. Cooper

Many of the plain people of the USA, such as the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, and Old German Baptist Brethren, believe most electronic media including computers and the Internet to be inherently unethical and sacrilegious. During research in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the author of the following article determined to find out why such groups abstain from the telephone, television, radio, film, and in many cases, the computer and the Internet.

Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

The Internet has been largely idealized as the new technology that will unite the whole world via the magic of computers. Few seem to realize that it has actually become the newest form of apartheid, an ‘electronic apartheid’, bigger than any other form of discrimination as it tries to cover the whole world. Whoever doesn’t read, speak and write English is out of the game, segregated, banned, and sent straight to the ghettos of Spanish, Hindi, French, Mandarin or any other underrepresented language. The ‘official’ language of Internet has become the new skin colour of cultural supremacy, of cultural domination at its best.

Philip Lee

Digital technology is radically transforming traditional concepts of historical and social memory with far-reaching consequences for self-awareness and identity. Now that anything can be digitised, including the human body, how will our understanding of ‘past’ and ‘future’ change? How will people cross the borders of their real and virtual worlds?

Dafne Sabanes Plou

América Latina es el continente donde han crecido más los usuarios de Internet en los últimos años. Su número aumentó 14 veces entre 1995 y 1999, pero no obstante se trata de una cifra pequeña comparada a la cantidad de población que está todavía alejada de estos avances tecnológicos. Sólo un 3,5% de los latinoamericanos es usuaria de Internet. Este artículo expone el argumento que para una comunicación democrática y un libre intercambio de información, Internet debe ser un sistema abierto, donde los lenguajes y protocolos permiten la intercomunicación entre sistemas diversos, universales y de dominio público.

Bernard R. Bonnot

The media environment in the USA today is one in which a company that didn’t exist 20 years ago can swallow up Time Warner. That’s part of the agony, the uncertainty of a dynamic situation. Even the most prosperous and powerful of media enterprises worries about being taken over whole by some yahoo or other and about their executives migrating to some e-commerce start-up. But there are compensations, as the following article suggests.