Date of publication: 31/12/1996. Editorial 52.  Cross the stream where it is shallowest The just published Estudio General de Medios’ survey of the third wave has shown that the “iron rule” of Internet has come into effect in Spain: in l996 the number of internauts doubled. Now there are 800,000 of us (with a more […]

Date of publication: 24/12/1996. Editorial 51. Necessity knows no law The first sign that something was wrong was the message that came over the intercom. “Would the passenger who is using a mobile telephone please turn it off – it is interfering with the plane’s communications systems.” The second was the three men that suddenly […]

Date of publication: 17/12/1996. Editorial 50. (A reply to Quim Gil 2) Many kiss the hand they wish to cut off “Does the USA always have to be the only point of reference on the Internet? It doesn’t seem that they are genetically and/or historically predestined to be so. Is their supremacy unavoidable? In Tokyo […]

Date of publication: 10/12/1996. Editorial 49. (A reply to Quim Gil 1) Still waters run deep Temperatures have risen in the discussion list of the Digital Journalist’s Group with Quim Gil’s justified outcry at the fact that no-one seems interested in debating the point of view he put forward in the article “Xarxaires enxarxats” which was distributed […]

Date of publication: 3/12/1996. Editorial 48.  We have all the information, but not the truth (Chinese proverb, probably post-Mao) Lewis Mumford said that human groups reach “maturity” when a body specialised in policing is formed. Wherever the function of policing had been traditionally performed by the group itself, there came a moment in which the […]

Date of publication: 26/11/1996. Editorial 47. * Nineth article in a series on digital journalism.  One never sees what is next until it arrives I am bringing this series of articles on digital journalism to an end with an examination of the position that the traditional media will occupy in the new digital world. Of […]

Date of publication: 19/11/1996. Editorial 46. * Eighth article in a series on digital journalism.  He that hath time, and looketh for more, loseth time Distribution lists which reflect on the world of communication and the new media (some of which are more than five years old on the Internet and in Compuserve) are full […]

Date of publication: 12/11/1996. Editorial 45. *Seventh article in a series on digital journalism Teaching we learn The other day, during a seminar on Internet, somebody asked me what I would have asked the Net for if it were Santa Claus. My answer was: What we are doing right here, in other words that people […]

Date of publication: 5/11/1996. Editorial 044. *Sixth article in a series on digital journalism You can’t see the wood for the trees All the media were quite content in their respective niches (producing printed, broadcast or audio-visual information) and then suddenly the Internet turned up and spoilt the party. Overnight the dikes opened and everything […]

Date of publication: 29/10/1996. Editorial 043. *Fifth article in a series on digital journalism  The hare will leap out where you least expect it (Don Quixote Chapter II) This is an article with an (as yet unknown) expiry date. A lot of what I have to say now about the Internet and journalists, especially those […]

Date of publication: 22/10/1996. Editorial 042. * Fourth article in a series on digital journalism. New King, new law Amidst the roar caused by the collapse of an entire empire and at a time when the world had hardly begun to digest the new scenario which the end of the Cold War brought about, a […]

Date of publication: 15/10/1996. Editorial 041. *Third article in a series on digital journalism. Every grain has its bran The search engine Altavista claims to consult 30 million pages. 30 million pages is a lot of pages. One can only ask oneself, albeit out of sheer professional habit, who the hell is writing all that material and how […]

Date of publication: 08/10/1996. Editorial 040. * Second article in a series on digital journalism. It is not the same to preach as to give wheat There is a matter pending within the Spanish internaut community: ironically enough, journalists have not taken the Internet by storm. The possibilities of the new media as a source […]

Date of publication: 01/10/1996. Editorial 039. * First article in a series on digital journalism. The road takes shape as one walks Will newspapers succumb to the digital weight of the Internet? Is this medium condemned to death by the increasing expansion of the virtual meta-medium? Will we end up reading the news electronically–in some form […]

Date of publication: 24/09/1996. Editorial 038. To each his own There is a lot of rubbish in the Net. There is hardly any good information to be found. Most pages are like old fish bones, orange peels, leftovers, in short, material which is crying out to be tossed into the digital waste dump where it […]

Date of publication: 17/09/1996. Editorial 037. What you do at night, is revealed in the morning Helsingius has shut down his computer. And, in doing so, he has extinguished one of the most well-known bastions of freedom in the Internet: the possibility of sending anonymous e-mail. The Finn Johan Helsingius was director of one of […]

Date of publication: 10/09/1996. Editorial 036. None so deaf as those that will not hear The International Union of Telecommunications (UTI) tells us that there are more than 600 million people in the world who have never used a telephone. And, although one never knows how these UN agencies arrive at such precise figures about […]

Date of publication: 3/9/1996. Editorial 035. “The house shows the owner” One of the most resounding gaps in the Declaration of Human Rights was that it did not include the telephone and television as basic rights for the modern individual. But the French Revolution couldn’t cover everything. It didn’t even mention the car, that paradigm […]

Date of publication: 28/8/1996. Editorial 034. Getting up early doesn’t make the dawn come sooner San Francisco.- Last week in the USA large front page headlines in nearly all the media welcomed the arrival of version 3.0. It was the first item on the CNN news which fired the opening shot in what many have […]

Date of publication: 20/8/1996. Editorial 033. “A cold hand and a warm heart” The Internet phenomenon is so difficult to grasp that each day we encounter new points of reference which attempt to explain it. Internet is like a creature, but also like a fascinating crystal in full growth. It’s like a set of numbers […]

Date of publication: 13/8/1996. Editorial 032. He that commits a fault, thinks that everyone speaks of it The ministers of the G7, the group of the world’s wealthiest countries, want to keep a watchful eye on Internet because, they say, it is becoming like the cave of Ali Baba and the forty terrorists. The Net, […]

Date of publication: 6/8/1996. Editorial 031. “Out of sight, out of mind” About four years ago I had to find some statistical data on the Spanish population. I requested this information from the appropriate public office in Madrid, from the economic studies department of a well-known bank and….I searched the Internet and Compuserve to see […]

Date of publication: 30/7/1996. Editorial 030. A rolling stone gathers no moss Vinton Cerf maintains –and he is not alone in this– that Internet is causing a veritable gold rush, a wild race for the gold stored in the virtual treasure chest of cyberspace. Just as they did in the last century in various parts […]

Date of publication: 23/7/1996. Editorial 029. Put your mouth where your wallet is Spanish is now Internet’s second language, despite us. The great web page factory in this language is to be found in the United States. Holland also has a sizeable production centre. Latin America, taken as a whole, is keeping up a steady […]

Date of publication: 16/7/1996. Editorial 028. A house with two doors is difficult to keep Up until now, European governments have maintained a rather discreet attitude towards Internet. Apart from the much publicised cases of Germany and France, in which they tried to kill the messenger (the suppliers of on-line services) when they were unable to […]

Date of publication: 09/07/1996. Editorial 027. A house with two doors is difficult to keep “The purpose of architecture is to improve our lives”. How many people in the world could, would like to or wish to subscribe to that phrase of Zaha Hadid’s, the Iranian architect who intervened in the tumultuous Congress of the […]

Date of publication: 4/7/1996. Editorial 026. What you get in your mother’s milk, on your death bed is spilled An hour before leaving Montreal, where I had been attending the Internet Society’s Sixth International Internet Conference, I got the news that my mother had died in Madrid. I dedicate this article, which I am starting […]

Date of publication: 25/6/1996. Editorial 025. The Devil is the father of lies The recent Internet Global Forum held in Barcelona and organized by the American magazine Fortune, emphasised the increasing power of the economic side of the net. Making an appearance along with the instant millionaires, such as the founders of Yahoo and Netscape, […]

Date of publication: 18/6/1996. Editorial 024 Sow thin, mow thin The 12 June 1996 will be celebrated for a long time to come as a kind of birthday for Internet. The sentence handed down on that day by the court in Philadelphia which declared the Communications Decency Act (CDA) unconstitutional, is not only the first […]

Date of publication: 11/06/1996. Editorial 023. To make a hole to cover another one In November 1974, Isaac Asimov told a group of students at the Newark School of Engineering the subject of the first story he sold to John Campbell, which appeared in “Astounding Science Fiction” in July 1939. Asimov was just 19 years […]

Date of publication: 4/6/1996. Editorial 22. The man who eats by himself, saddles his horse by himself Co-operation among competitors is a principle which apparently breaks with the Darwinism which currently governs our economic life. Although recent biological theories are tending to begin to emphasise the co-operative factor when examining the nature of evolution, the […]

Date of publication: 28/05/1996. Editorial 021. He that speaks the thing he should not, will hear the thing he would not The bit generation includes all age groups and cuts across all generations but it is nevertheless getting younger day by day. This is not because young people are legion in cyberspace, but because more […]

Date of publication: 21/05/1996. Editorial 020. When one door shuts, hundred opens Demographic surveys of Internet, proliferating lately like mushrooms after rain, have consistently been coming up with a significant piece of information over the last few months: users of the Internet tend to watch less television, sometimes as much as 75% less than they […]

Date of publication: 14/5/1996. Editorial 019. A bird is known for its note and a man for his talk Internet has fired the imaginations of internauts as though this were the night before Christmas and Father Christmas was on his way. In discussions about Internet and what it offers and how to use it, almost […]

Date of publication: 07/05/1996. Editorial 018. Every man likes his own things best Internet is on the brink of a population explosion which would make the world’s serious over-population problem pale into insignificance. Digital demographers move in murky waters when trying to decide on approximate internaut population figures. But, considering what has happened to the […]

Date of publication: 30/04/1996. Editorial 017. Chastity lies far from the madding crowd A couple of nights ago I spent time navigating and taking “a walk on the wild side” of the net. I had to do an article on a new digital sex-shop, the first to open its doors in Internet from Barcelona, and […]

Date of publication: 16/04/1996. Editorial 015. Each bird sings its own song The electronic news stand is on its way to displaying 3,000 newspapers from all around the world. 3,000 newspapers which have leapt into cyberspace from the printed press, although logically enough, without abandoning wood pulp. If it is already difficult to find the […]

Date of publication: 23/04/1996. Editorial 016. From Little Acorns, Mighty Oaks Do Grow The fields of cyberspace are built on forests that can remain standing. Although we are still a long way from having a gadget which enables us to read information in any situation and with the flexibility required, the fact is bits carry […]

Date of publication: 09/04/1996. Editorial 014. Those who live in glasshouses, should not throw stones Each time Nicholas Negroponte is interviewed, he is asked the inevitable, obligatory question: “Will the increase in electronic information and communication bring the era of printed newspapers to an end?” MITs guru always answers with a categorical: “Yes. Although we […]

Date of publication: 02/04/1996. Ediorial 013. They are welcome that bring something with them Internauts are like flocks of birds from different destinations landing in groups, unaware of their origins, but discovering collective objectives merely because they have flown together whatever their plumage, size or beak shape. We work industriously to elaborate a new concept […]

Date of publication: 26/03/1996. Editorial 012. Just a three day wonder Population studies on the Internet are proving to be just as complicated, if not more so, than real ones. Each new poll merrily changes results obtained only three months ago by various millions. Each prediction on the possible internaut population in the year 2000 […]

Date of publication: 19/03/1996. Editorial 011. All doors are open to the man with a trade Krzysztof Kieslowski has left us. The most European of all film makers has gone — European in the sense of Renaissance Europe connected as it was by Latin. Latin, the vehicle of communication which spread the creative force of […]

Date of publication: 12/03/1996. Editorial 010. To take the nuts from the fire with the dog’s foot The World Wide Web is Internet’s glittering window display. The enormous department store open 24 hours a day, with its neon signs blazing and its shelves constantly stocked with goods, services and promises. They say that a new […]

Date of publication: 05/03/1996. Editorial 009. All the flowers are not in one garland “Yes, this all sounds great, but in the end, who really controls the information on Internet? And how long will it be before the big corporations get control of it?” This is the inevitable question which stifles any attempt to forecast […]

Date of publication: 27/02/1996. Editorial 008. He who is given a choice is given an understanding More than once a month I am asked to give a seminar on Internet and its possibilities. Since mid-1995 I have encountered people from a wide spectrum of professions, from my fellow journalists — on the whole a technophobic […]

Date of publication: 20/02/1996. Editorial 007. Many drops make a shower An aircraft carrier or a frigate. When we talk about Internet we talk about navigation, so choosing the ship in which we sail cyberspace is one of the decisions internauts face. At the moment, it is possible to travel the Net at the mercy […]

[As you can see this page is in black, because the American government is trying to establish some kind of censorship in the Internet, using the Decency Act.] Date of publication: 13/02/1996. Editorial 006. Of one ill comes many What happens to an aeroplane packed with passengers but piloted by someone who has never set […]

Date of publication: 06/02/1996. Editorial 005. He who keeps company with wolves, will learn to howl A warning to the onlookers in the harbour and those about to embark: Internet does not, and will not, solve the problem of human happiness. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is. This is one of the […]

Date of publication: 30/01/1996. Editorial 004. “You may gape long enough, ere a bird fall into your mouth” Who will the Leonardo da Vinci’s of the electronic Renaissance be? Who will the artists that manage to capture the energy and imagination of millions of internauts be? Where will the creative movement arise that takes full […]

Date of publication: 23/01/1996. Editorial 003. On tenterhooks The fate of the Benedictines in the XV century and British rural immigration in the XIX century are the two historical milestones which perhaps can help us to best understand the phenomenon of the Internet, or more correctly speaking, that of the interactive information society and how […]

Date of publication: 16/01/1996. Editorial 002. Everybody is wise after the event Curiously enough, the best testing ground for measuring the effects of full participation or otherwise in this “Information Age” does not, at the moment, lie in the South (or as a friend of mine calls them “countries threatened by development”), but among ourselves: […]

Date of publication: 08/01/1996. Editorial 001. Every coin has its dark side Internet signifies the consecration of English as the language that acts as a bridge between all other languages in the world. This is one of the uncompromising affirmations brandished about by those who take it upon themselves to philosophise about the Internet without […]