Part 1: what is the Internet? What is it for?
I'm expecting very clear answers from you.
First, Joël de Rosnay.
What is the Internet?
There are 3 key elements.
It's a network of networks communicating...
Computers communicating with themselves and people.
- Via data processing. - Yes.
Second, computers hold information.
They are a treasure trove of things,
images and sound.
Your personal computer is like an old phone receiver,
with a speaker and a mike,
but with a screen, keyboard and modem.
It takes you to the Internet.
Third, to understand all this,
how do you leap between computers?
To do so, you need
some kind of dashboard:
browser software.
They have revolutionized the so-called Internet surfing,
to search for information.
Dominique Nora, its use?
Yes, what can we use it for?
The most common use is for electronic mail.
30 million people are connected to the Internet.
- Throughout the world. - Indeed.
About 100 countries now have access.
They type short messages
and instantly, their notes are sent to an electronic address
half a world away, if you have your correspondent's address.
You can write to them.
It's the modern equivalent of the telephone.
You can pass on information, culture, anything.
As well as pictures, and soon, videos.
All right.
Arnaud Dufour, what is an internaute?
An internaute is an Internet user
and certainly not an alien.
- There are 2 of them here. 3! - Right.
So, an internaute...
It's the French equivalent of net surfer.
It is. It's a translation.
So, we scrap the English word, right?
- Yes. - It's a new environment where...
I'm talking about the French word.
- Net surfer is out. - Or cybernaute.
Good. So, what's the web?
The web, as described by Mr. de Rosnay,
is a system
enabling you to access information in a very simple way,
thanks to a graphical interface called a browser.
Another word for it is "navigator".
It enables you to search for info on the Internet.
The web's main advantage is...
But this... This is a... a server.
A web server, what... We have one at France 2.
This is a web client displaying the contents of the first page,
the homepage in English or start page
of France 2's web server,
which is located somewhere else.
France 2's server... It's a site too, isn't it?
We call it a website.
For our viewers, it isn't English. S-I-T-E is the French word.
So, France 2's web server has been only around for a few weeks.
We put out a call to internautes,
and they've sent us messages, asked questions.
I shall read from them throughout the program.
They can continue to send their opinions about this program
or ask you questions throughout the show.
By the way, I'd like
to mention that French internautes
living in Los Angeles, Montreal,
Tampa, Florida and Singapore
have sent us messages
to tell us how delighted they are with France 2's web service
because, thanks to this instant connection,
they can hear about events in France.
They're far away,
France 2 tells them what happened during the day.
With images and sound.
More importantly, you can put in your own web server.
All servers are connected round the clock.
- To understand the power... - So...
To help you understand what the Internet offers,
Arnaud Dufour,
you used France 2's computer,
and Élisabeth Preschey filmed you.
To find info on the Internet,
there are all sorts of catalogues and directories, like phone books.
I'm on one of the main directories here.
I'm looking for the server
of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.
I've typed the keywords.
Then I hit the Search button.
A list of documents appears on screen.
They contain one or several of the keywords I entered.
Particularly, here's a link to the server
of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.
This site promotes the Museum,
and presents their exhibitions.
For example here,
here's a list of current exhibitions,
in particular one called "Measures and Excess".
Such a server lets tourists anywhere in the world
prepare a trip to Paris
by providing them from their home
all the practical info they need,
such as opening hours and entry fees.
Here's another aspect of the Internet.
We're going to connect to the White House's server.
It is located in Washington.
With just a few mouse clicks, you can send a personal note
to the US President.
Now let us go to Japan,
to visit Sony's website,
where the firm publishes its financial records.
And so, an investor could find
accurate information about the firm's performance,
here for the last term of the year.
Another possible use:
giving a voice to minorities or groups
fighting for a number of ideals,
Here's the example of Greenpeace.
You can take action and become an activist.
Now we're reaching the steamy part of the Internet.
Here's the website of Playboy Magazine.
It displays the table of contents
of the latest issue,
pictures of past months' Playmates,
and you can order a few gadgets,
such as tee-shirts
or other promotional items.
The Internet also offers
small music bands the opportunity to make themselves known
to a wider public.
Here's a Parisian band called Régale-moi
promoting themselves over the Internet,
and listing their upcoming concerts.
You can also listen to some musical samples.
This might help them find producers
or a record company for example.
The telephone, the press and TV are superposed technologies.
The Internet comes on top of other technologies.
It isn't going to replace them or take over from them.
Its true position is one of acceleration, globalisation,
and profusion.
But it isn't the revolution of the century.
Is it the first information highway? What a word!
It's the prototype
of what we call information highways in France.
That is, a network enabling the passage of text, sound,
still images,
soon to become animated.
It augurs a new way of communicating.
But we're still riding small bikes right now,
not high-speed trains.
We've had 2 waves. We're about to experience the third one.
I partly agree.
The third wave is coming.
The first wave is the Minitel.
France has shown the world online interactive systems,
with a turnover of 6 billion francs.
The second wave is the Internet.
The computer has replaced the small Minitel box.
The third wave is going to be about high speed.
In addition to the density of Internet exchanges,
we'll have high-speed communication lines.
Our bikes will go on high-speed trains.
I'd be more nuanced.
Consider Internet uses in so-called intranets, inside firms.
There, speed is already sizeable.
A word... The Internet has existed for 25 years.
What a surprise! Who invented it?
The military.
The military, the ARPA network.
- In which country? - The USA.
They asked engineers for a strong enough network
to withstand a nuclear war.
It's so strong that it's virtually indestructible.
Then the general public caught hold of it
as it's such a convenient way to communicate
beyond scientific exchanges.
Scientists started communicating on the Vietnam war,
but then the network slipped out of its designers' hands,
and became a mainstream network in the US.
The web made it known.
It's full of American sharks though.
It's full of everything, highway men too.
It's transitioning,
from a subsidised, military, scientific past,
to an unknown future, presumably a more commercial one.
But the Internet's spirit is libertarian and very pioneer.
Arnaud Dufour,
I could only find 3 lines about the web in your book.
Here they are.
Internet has existed for 20 years.
But it exploded in the media and general public 2 years ago.
It's the web, a system invented in Europe,
at the CERN lab in Geneva, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau,
that made it such a huge success.
It used to be for researchers only.
You needed computing skills to access the Internet.
The WWW has opened up the Internet
to the general public by introducing multimedia.
But the European input is never mentioned!
The French had a huge impact too.
I don't quite agree. The system was invented at CERN,
to share files inside the lab,
but here this was only text,
no multimedia.
It was at the University of Illinois,
that students added the user interface
that has become so common and so convenient.
The amazing thing
is that Tim Berners-Lee was 26
and Marc Andreessen was 22.
He's now a millionaire with Netscape.
Their idea was to connect three things that were separate.
The complex computer network,
online multimedia systems,
in the form of stacks of data called hypertext,
not in a linear form like in a book,
and software browser programs.
The assembly of the three produced the web.
The difference
is that they turned
the Himalayas into easy mountain roads for tourists to...
- Not everybody could, could they? - Well, they did.
We should pay tribute to them.
Certainly.
And to Europe,
for starting the web.
Let us not forget the Minitel.
We tend to forget it but it paved the way.
Let's go over to Part 2 of our program.
Is this for better or for worse?
Paul Virilio, I'm asking you first.
I'll quote Aesop's on tongues: it's for better and for worse.
Information, as we can see with the Internet,
makes a global community possible,
a virtual one but still.
At the same time, there's mania, revisionists, racists, etc.,
that are beginning to multiply.
It's for better and for worse.
I'm much more worried about its extraterritoriality.
We hear about French suburbs being lawless zones,
I work on that too.
As lawless zones go, compared to the Internet,
suburbs are a joke.
With the globalisation of the Internet, we are setting up
a system that completely eludes the law.
Remember that the law exists for the weak,
not for the strong.
And so, we have a deregulation system which the Americans know well.
After the Vietnam war,
they started the deregulation of air transport.
Now we're facing the deregulation of transmission,
and it could generate huge issues for democracies.
Of course, in the future,
we'll probably have answers.
But we can't see them yet.
The key question is how do we regulate?
From the top or the bottom?
That is, should the regulation come from governments or users?
It isn't settled yet. It will probably be both.
Regulation by governments
seems like the easiest, quickest option,
if you examine what's been done with the cinema, press,
and Minitel.
It's much trickier on the Internet because it isn't tied to location.
Is regulation by users possible?
They haven't got
the ethics yet,
the skills, to self-regulate.
Why not trust the human spirit
which, educated by debate and critique, could find a balance.
We know the limits of any regulation in a globalised world.
And we can't say, Paul Virilio,
I hope you'll allow me,
that the Internet is above the law, creating a legal vacuum.
Consider this.
We have international agreements in various areas.
The Internet touches all areas of life:
banking, the press, debate,
pornography...
Money too. One of our viewers says:
The world of money is behind it all, for communication control.
What about countries or people without money?
The communication society
isn't new.
We already have major laws
for the press.
Other countries have a minimal framework too.
Respect the human being. Don't libel or slander.
Don't insult the head of state.
We have international agreements for this.
Human rights, communication, Helsinki and so forth.
Who will make the laws?
We made the Law of the Sea...
No animal, social regulation.
We made the Space Law. Why not a Cyberspace Law?
It's in the works.
Governments are working together to propose regulations.
They'd agree?
Well, China
and Iraq have decided to close in on themselves.
The Babel myth on the next level.
Old Babel was a tower, now we're circling the world instantly.
Allow me a pun: no more tower,
but an instant tour.
All communications happen in real time,
we've just watched a story on this,
and now, the world lives at one single time
as...
The theme of your book.
As Hamlet said : "The time is out of joint."
The rotation of the Earth used to generate local times,
day and night, time zones.
It's now replaced by axial time, live action, real time.
It's a typical Babelian event,
but a second generation one, not a first generation.
The most worrying
might be the segmentation of people.
Passionate for a topic, they could retreat in a bubble
and never experience or discover anything else.
This is for you,
Jean-Marie Pelt.
Recently, an American filed for divorce
for virtual adultery.
His wife had private conversations with a virtual lover
she had never seen,
but with whom she chatted non-stop.
- In a way... - Telesexuality.
Telesexuality.
The virtual lover's name was "The Weasel".
So the husband filed...
It's a legal issue.
To me, the real problem
is that we're going to be flooded
by billions of gigabytes,
all of us,
and in that global information magma
we won't know where to look.
I think we have announced too soon
the demise of mediators.
Editors, libraries, all these people...
That's comforting!
That's why we need to think about it.
Let's not be afraid.
How will roles shift for librarians, for editors?
- All those intelligent agents. - He's right.
The greatest danger is to be choked by one's own pollution.
See what I mean?
A new info-pollution. There's too much on the Internet.
No, wait. Too much information kills information.
The knowledge you acquire...
Too much advertising...
- Too much tax kills tax. - No, wait.
Acquiring knowledge
is about integrating it.
Learning is about integrating knowledge.
You're actually...
Paul Virilio.
You're actually confirming Einstein's intuition in the 1950s.
He said to Abbé Pierre, and it is worth repeating:
"There are 3 bombs: first the atomic bomb."
It had just exploded, this was in the 50s.
"Second, the information bomb". The idea of "informatics" was there.
The word didn't exist yet.
It is true that interactivity has the potential
for generating a phenomenon both of disjunction and fusion,
and an unheard-of disintegration.
If you take seriously, as I do, both the Internet and telecommunication,
this could very well lead to a social crash
just like the stock market crash.
- That bad? - Of course.
Global interactivity, at high speed,
not low speed,
has never been contemplated.
This kind of deregulation
is of a totally different nature than letters, laws, codes, etc.
We must take this seriously.
If we do so, we'll be able to discourage
the kind of integral accident that is threatening us.
Last question, Charles Tiné says,
on France 2's web server:
The less fortunate must be able to hop on this train,
otherwise it will generate a new form of exclusion.
Many viewers have said that.
Info-rich and info-poor.
And the exclusion... The gap is widening.
- Education... - It's widening?
50 % of US schools have Internet access.
For a hospital,
that doesn't have the specialist needed for a specific diagnostic,
telecommunication systems,
with real-time imagery
can be a great tool to share knowledge
and distribute it.
It goes beyond that.
We can have a global network of skills
if we're willing to put it together.