From the Print Media to the Internet, Marie Lebert [ebook reader with highlighter txt] 📗

is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does on-line. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and conventional society.

Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not necessarily insure the public interest."

2.2. The "Info-Rich" and the "Info-Poor"

There is a close correlation between economic and social development and access to telecommunications. Access to new communication technologies expands much more rapidly in the North than in the South, and there are many more web servers in North America and in Europe than on the other continents. Two-thirds of the Internet users live in the United States, where 40% of households are equipped with a computer, a percentage that we also find in Denmark, Switzerland and Netherlands. The percentage is 30% in Germany, 25% in United Kingdom, and 20% for most industrialized countries.

The statistics of March 1998 on the percentage of connections per number of inhabitants, available in the Computer Industry Almanach (CIA), a reference document on the evolution of cyberspace, show that Finland is the most connected country in the world with 25% of its population connected, followed by Norway (23%) and Iceland (22.7%). The United States is in fourth place with 20%. Eleven countries in the world have a proportion of Internet users above 10%, and Switzerland is eleventh, with 10.7%.

Regarding the global percentage, the statistics of end 1997 of the Computer Industry Almanach - which take into consideration the connections at home, at work and in academic institutions - show that the United States is still considerably ahead with 54.68% of the global percentage, followed by Japan (7.97%), the United Kingdom (5.83%) and Canada (4.33%). The survey also shows that the US lead is constantly decreasing - it went from 80% in 1991 to less than 65% in 1994, with prospects of 50% in 1998 and less than 40% in 2000.

Nevertheless, if we consider the whole planet, universal access to information highways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity varies from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries to less than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in the world are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's population has never used a phone.

In the developing countries, it is unlikely that Internet connections will use traditional phone lines, as there are other technological solutions. The developing countries' equipment rate for digital lines is equivalent to the rate of industrialized countries. The growth in mobile telephony is also spectacular. The solution could be brought by cellular radiotelephony and satellite connection.

However, the demarcation between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" does not systematically follow the demarcation between the so-called developed and developing countries. Access to information technology in the so-called rich countries is also rather uneven. Some developing countries, such as Malaysia or a number of countries in Latin America, have a very dynamic telecommunication policy. In the documents prepared for the second Conference on the Development of Telecommunications in the World, organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) from March 23 to April 1, 1998 in Valletta, Malta, it was stated that several developing countries, such as Botswana, China, Chile, Thailand, Hungary, Ghana and Mauritius, succeeded in extending the density and the quality of their phone services during the last three years. On the other hand, the situation was getting worse for the poorest countries.

During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Wilfred
Kiboro, Managing Director and Chief Executive of Nation Printers and Publishers
Ltd., Kenya, stated:

"Information technology needs to be brought to affordable levels. I have a dream that perhaps in our lifetime in Africa, we will see villagers being able to access [the] Internet from their rural villages where today there is no water and no electricity. We hope they will be able to watch Sky News on their portable televisions, but maybe this is just a dream."

For the media particularly, there is an abyss between the 'info-rich' and the 'info-poor'. In many African countries, the circulation of newspapers is very low compared to the population figures, and each copy is read by at least twenty people. According to Wilfred Kiboro, who noticed in his company a drop in the newspapers' price thanks to multimedia convergence, distribution costs could drop with the use of a printing system by satellite which could do away with the need for transporting newspapers by truck throughout the country.

Nevertheless, multimedia convergence in particular and the globalization of the economy in general has put the developing countries in a position of inferiority because the printing and radio-television broadcasting means are in the hands of a few main western groups. Cultural problems exist alongside economic problems. Paradoxically, information relating to Africa and broadcast for Africans doesn't come from the African continent, but is broadcast by westerners who transmit their own vision of Africa, without any real perception of its economic and social situation.

Some developing countries - such as Mauritania - rely on the Web to regain prestige, as explained by Emmanuel Genty and Jean-Pierre Turquoi in the daily French newspaper Le Monde of March 30, 1998. Mauritania presented its Government Official Site at the headquarters of the World Bank during the Days of the Consultative Group for Mauritania (Journées du Groupe consultatif pour la Mauritanie) on March 25-27, 1998. This event took place following the media focus on the continued existence of slavery in this country, despite the fact that it has been officially abolished for years. The website is intended to be the country's shop window for tourists and foreign investors. On the other hand, the use of the Internet inside the country is heavily regulated by the Post and Telecommunication Office (Office des postes et des télécommunications - OPT), which is the national operator. And things are made even more difficult because of prohibitive connection costs - three times the cost of a local phone call.

China is also discovering digital information through the China Wide Web, which is the country's national Internet. The number of its subscribers jumped from 100,000 in 1996 to 600,000 in 1997. Set up by the China Internet Corporation (CIC), a company based in Hong Kong, the China Wide Web is a business and information network more or less cut off from the rest of the world, and screened and controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The abyss between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" is not only the one dividing developed and developing countries. In any country, there are gaps between the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the people who belong to society and the people who are rejected by it. As a new communication medium, the Internet can be a way out of the abyss. Anyone can have an e-mail address on the Net. Anyone can use the Web in the public library or in the premises of some association, to find information or look for a job.

2.3. The Web: First English, Then Multilingual

In the beginning, the Web was nearly 100% English, which can be easily explained by the fact that the Internet was created in the United States as a network set up by the Pentagon (in 1969) before spreading to US governmental agencies and to universities. After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), Geneva, Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic (the ancestor of Netscape) from November 1993 onwards, the Web, too, began to spread, first in the US thanks to considerable investments made by the government, then around North America, and then to the rest of the world.

The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than in any other country is due to different factors - these countries are among the leaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware and software, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than in the rest of the world.

In Hugues Henry's article, La francophonie en quête d'identité sur le Web (Francophony in search of identity on the Web), published in the Dossiers of the daily cybermagazine Multimédium, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, author of Chroniques de Cybérie, a weekly cybermagazine widely read in the French-speaking Internet community, explained:

"In Quebec I am spending about 120 hours per month on-line. My Internet access is $30 [Canadian]; if I add my all-inclusive phone bill which is about $40 (with various optional services), the total cost of my connection is $70 per month. I leave you to guess what the price would be in France, in Belgium or in Switzerland, where the local communications are billed by the minute, for the same number of hours on-line."

It follows that many European surfers spend much less time on the Web than they would like, or choose to surf at night to cut their expenses. At the end of 1998, in several countries (Italy, Germany, France, etc.), surfers began to boycott the Internet for one day to make phone companies aware of their needs and give them a special monthly rate.

In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies and the Internet Society, ran the first major study of the actual distribution of languages on the Internet. The results are published in the Web Languages Hit Parade, dated June 1997, and the languages, listed in order of usage, are: English 82.3%, German 4.0%, Japanese 1.6%, French 1.5%, Spanish 1.1%, Swedish 1.1%, and Italian 1.0%.

To reach as large an audience as possible, the solution is to create bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual sites. The website of the Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir presents the newspaper in six languages: French, English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poètes (Club of Poets), a French site dedicated to poetry, presents its site in English, Spanish and Portuguese. E-Mail-Planet, a free e-mail address provider, provides a menu in six languages (English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).

As the Web quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of
English-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of the
Web recognize that, although English may be the main international language for
exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.

Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use AltaVista Translation, which translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfer can also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he will get a usable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very helpful, but will never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a human translator with special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the site.

The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverse languages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improve communication among everyone in the international Internet community.

In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD Network
News) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained:

"This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide Web'. […] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German, 14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the Web whose native language is not English. […] Only 6 percent of the world population speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), while about 80 percent of all web pages are in English."

Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2,061,220 words in 432 dictionaries (as of December 10, 1998) in various fields: business; computer/Internet; medical; miscellaneous; religion; science; sports; technology; general; and slang. In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, he wrote:

"An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and I think I learned something from it.

In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me… the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way