The World Wide Web is a European invention. The technical standards for WWW were developed in the early nineties by CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics). But it was in the United States that the Web was popularized, marketed and hyped. Cyberspace lobbyists such as California's Wired Magazine champion this techno-cultural legitimation of neo-liberalism and, along with it, the broader, denser global market induced by telecommunication. The Internet is seen to be synonymous with globalization. However, the question is how cultural difference, minorities and local subjectivities can be preserved and networked by WWW. What has the Internet brought Europe? Has a European Net culture evolved yet? Or should we fear a European Intranet, a digital Fortress Europe? Bigwig and Raprabbit Discussing Europe:
Bigwig: Europe needs to be number one on our list of topics. Even in obscure new media gatherings. The Europeans have to design their own media space or else it will loose it's identity and it's economic strength. Raprabbit: But Europe is a bureaucracy. Nothing more, nothing less. It's existence is defined by Brussels and it's enemies. Why should we engage ourselves with this one dimensional and defensive structure? Bigwig: Because that Europe you dislike is in power and is determining the rules for the media space where all Europeans live under. Why do you want to hide for your responsibility? Why are you passionately flaming the Californian Dream and at the same time withdrawing from the discussions concerning your own geographical surroundings ?
Raprabbit: Because you can't reach the people with whom you really need to discuss this. They hide in bureaucra­ tic castles. Europe is a moving target. With the people I respect and associate myself with, I rather discuss more productive aims.
Bigwig: So you are hiding for reality. The industry doesn't! Why should specially the tactical media people, like artists and activists, try to keep there hands clean and dissolve in the utopian ecstacy of cyberspace. Raprabbit: / can't afford to put time in the dreadlock called Europe. I’m in the middle of building the new media space you are constantly talking about. Don't haunt me with my responsibilities.
AND SO WHILE BIGWIG AND RAPRABBIT CONTINUED THEIR CONSTRUCTIVE TALK, EUROPE WAS SOLDED OVERNIGHT TO THE BANKERS Marleen Stikker. Net and Ambivalence
Technology and Politics in Eurospace The paper will address two different aspects of the Net: a) preparations for the Eurosummit in Amsterdam in mid-June 1997 b) how non-national resistance to Brussels is active in the Net and how this happened (e.g. using real audio, shared databases), and the accompanying bandwidth discussion about push media alternatives. The other aspect is the situation in Eastern Europe. Is it really dominated exclusively by American models of communication and organization? Will stock exchange speculator and philanthropist George Soros be alone in moulding the cultural sector of Net architecture in the east of Europe? Europe is sinking slowly into a wretched state of self-reference. In this situation, are Brussels and Soros suitable imaginary adversaries when it comes to formulating alternative Net policies? Can social movements only operate now through professional NGO structures? And is the "non­ commercial" company the only model throughout Europe for implementing utopias of universal access?
Geert Lovink. The net in America is on the verge of implosion. Hounded by a failure of profitability, the exhaustion of venture capital, a resounding scarcity of developed ideas, incessant attacks by the legislators of speech, and by a daunting acceleration of innovations, the net has become a ubiquitous source of hype surrounded by an aura of meaning subsumed in the ludicrous notion of 'content'. Indeed, recent attempts to legitimate the web have focused on the eradication of differences of all kinds (race, age, gender, infirmities, etc.) suggesting that the linking of minds somehow leapfrogs over the urgency of international crises and can find a sphere of psychic subjectivity that is resoundingly utopian and ultimately pathetic. Recently, Andy Grove, CEO of Intel rebuked a meeting of business leaders In Switzerland by Informing them that there was a crisis of culture in the slow assimilation of computers and networks in Europe. Beneath his deeply flawed corporate intentions was the not so subtle imperialism that so roots the American, no less Californian, ideology, that of the global village.
Surely Grove's deculturalized remarks signify more than disappointing sales, but reflect an utterly unconceptualized understanding of the net as slightly more than another marketing ploy for Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Africa, after the saturated American market pauses to await the next round. All in all, the honeymoon is over. Push media are arriving to drive so-called 'content' onto screens and to force-feed a public starving before they are hungry. The backlash is growing while the CEOsare cooking up the menu for the other markets.
Yet the 'others' are not so compliant and have developed an understanding of media whose utopias are nonsense, whose histories are not so cushy, and whose intellectual rigor and political savy undermines insipid market segmentations in favour of discourse and resistance.
Timothy Druckrey. A Euro-intranet would be nothing to fear. Just a few years ago, the Internet was widely perceived as an antidote to global media convergence, a great leveller giving voice to millions, and perhaps some day, billions of people who otherwise would never have been heard. Now the primary concern is whether or not the Net will be revealed as little more than a bit player in a seemingly nonstop rush toward a single, omnipresent top-down medium. Conceivably, the Net could be split and subsumed by previously existing technologies, namely television (the future o f the Web?) and the telephone (e-mail).
It's vital to consider the future of the Net in any culture in the context of the globalization that was long underway before the boom of the early nineties. Satellite and cable technologies combined with a system of distribution for film and literature based on appealing to the lowest common denominator were already forging a worldwide culture which had a distinctly U.S. American look and feel about it.
Intranets, metaphorical or otherwise, could indeed be tools for any culture, be it continental, civic, ethnic or any other, to resist absorption into a single, pay-per-view media machine.
David Hudson