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Subject: <nettime> Question: Europe on the internet?
From: mail@mail.thing.at (mail)
Date: 9 Jun 1998 20:41:51 +0200

* * * * *

Date: Tue, 9 Jun 98 19:40:09 -0000
From: Cultimo <jeroen-g@bigfoot.com>
To: <nettime-l@Desk.nl>
Sender: owner-nettime-l@basis.Desk.nl
Precedence: bulk

The internet from a European perspective

Trying to formulate a question, trying to develop a point of view
(with other words: I might be mistaken, please proof me wrong)

I'm living in Holland (Europe) and I'm managing a small internet
magazine. I think the internet is a great medium for digital publishing
because of it's possibilities and because of the laws that govern the
medium. But again and again I see that the main atention of the media
here is focussed on people who see huge business oportunities on the
internet. Which is not so strange because a European looking at the
internet sees something completely different than an American looking at
the same thing. There is an ocean between them. In America the
internetnet naturaly evolved from an expanding University network, and
students (that later became professors or managers / devolopers in
computerfirms) discovered the beauty of a chaotic democracy (that some
even called anarchy).

Europe has a lot of tradition, but this tradition is somehow developed on
a plain far from here. Europeans see the chaos of the democracy (which
Europe has experienced for the first time during the Athen's democracy)
and companies somehow think they see opurtunities to make a lot of
money. Those ideas come from a lot of articles that are published in
magazines with illustrations in breathtaking colors (because there are so
many colors which make them not quite esthetique). All the articles talk
about the enormous influence of the democracy on the internet, the
business opurtunities that lie there and the immense libraries filled to
the brim with multimedia artwork and games that are to be found on the
net.

But none of that can be found here. The net was not even developed for
that. That's one reason why. And espescially in Europe the internet is
developing towards a TV station with only commercials.

One of the reasons why could be that major webbrowser companies are
fighting each other by developing non compatible browsers. Every atempt
to make a nice multimedia 'something' is stoped short by cross-platform
and cross-browser problems. So everyone stays on the save side and does
nothing.

Another reason could be that European companies are not interested in
bringing real content to the net (i.e. a good netzine), exept for their
own commercial headlines telling the audience how great their products
are. They do not realize that all their money on great looking sites is
waisted when there is no audience. (There are a lot of organisations that
try to develop an art website, but they all charge mony from the artists,
so all these sites are empty.)

One of the other reasons could lie in the differences in the
tradition-field I described above. Europe has to develop it's own
internet tradition and history before the net in Europe is more American
(that stands for 'commercial' in Dutch, sorry) than even the Americans
would dream. For the entertainment one has to go to America and for the
commerce one goes to a European site.

So I would like to post a question: What is European about the Internet,
or what can we do to make the internet European, or what does a European
do on the Internet (except surfing to European commercial sites?)

Because if we do not find that out soon (and start acting to develop a
European-like internet), the internet will be lost to Europe: It is
washed down by to many commercial websites. And who wants to spend a lot
of money to buy a computer ready for the internet, when the only thing
that can be found is not the thing you are looking for?

Jeroen Goulooze
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