A penny saved is a penny earned The Chicago Tribune, founded in 1849 and one of the grand old US newspapers, is putting its complete collection on the Internet thanks to the work of convicts in various prisons in Ohio. They are going to type into the computer (“computerise”) all the issues that are too […]

Thinking of anything else is thinking of the impossible J.B.Wrightless, the President of the US, then said, ” It is our duty, at this time, to offer the world one of the most important agreements in recent history. The whole world is expecting us to resolve our differences and move forward, together, without exception, towards […]

What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t dream of The Internet is about to take a giant step out of the physical networks that contain it at present to make its presence felt in the real world. I don’t just mean those big billboards advertising portals or Internet addresses. No, this is something much […]

Let me talk about what is mine; don’t make me listen to anything else The World Trade Organisations’ (WTO) ministerial summit in Seattle has come to an end and as the ashes of protest settle all sorts of unforeseen analyses will now arise. The rich countries have been stretching things to the limit and, with […]

The devil laughs when the hungry feed the well-fed The titillating idea of “network computers”, launched three years ago by a small group of companies in competition with Microsoft, was immediately quashed, amongst others, by Bill Gates’ company. Now Mr. Seattle himself has deigned to descend into the arena of computer fairs to declare that […]

All the bed bugs are in the blanket Terra Networks’ speculative explosion sent shock waves through the Internet as powerful as those on the stock markets of Madrid and New York. So much has been said over the last few days about it that I don’t think its worth adding anything else about Telefonica’s feat […]

Not born yet and already sneezing Over the last couple of years, we have had to live with those bright new millionaires spawned by the Internet. And spawned is the right word because what they all have in common is that they are extremely youthful. All they had to do was arrive and go directly […]

Don’t tread on the tail of an animal you don’t know Over the next 50 years, the population of the Mediterranean basin will grow by 150 million new inhabitants. To which we can add the influx of those that move from other parts of Europe in search of sunny climes. Meanwhile, emigration from south to […]

He who digs out a lot of dirt does not dig very deep In an era like ours of such rapid and profound changes, the most productive question we can ask is how individuals, institutions, businesses and organisations are going to adapt to the new situation. If the central problem posed by the Information Society […]

Nobody says they are fine without adding: “For the moment, anyway” The Internet has substantially altered the information production process as we have known it. On the one hand, it provides the tools and context for creating new ways of generating and disseminating information to audiences which, in many cases, appear from nowhere. On the […]

A new tree bends in the wind; big, old ones break In the same way as mega-fusions amongst the big communications corporations to a large extent explain the global scope of the type of journalism belonging to the traditional media (see previous editorial “The Big Crush”), the proliferation of new media on the Internet is […]

Abundance kills the appetite The media, by furnishing society with an essential vision of itself, has become a fundamental part of the political system. If this system is rigid, dictatorial, totalitarian or fundamentalist, the media usually constructs a vision which corresponds to the regime in power. If the system is — to a certain degree– […]

A job half done is not worth a damn Will continuous takeovers of the media by big business — a local example of which is present in Telefonica policy — affect the type of information they offer, the quality of their content and the way they deal with the reality they inform on? And, secondly, […]

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place This weekend I was asked to give a talk on “The Internet in Education” during the XVI National Conference on Energy and Education, organised by the Nuclear Forum in Madrid. 700 school teachers from all over Spain filled the Faculty of Medicine’s Ramon y Cajal Great Hall […]

No pain, no gain Last week I attended a meeting of the World Bank in Washington. The World Bank Institute’s Environment and Nature Divison (WBIEN) organised a get-together of experts in environmental journalism to work out a programme for improving the dissemination of information of this kind in the media. Journalists from South Africa, China, […]

Everyone stretches their legs according to the length of their coverlet It wasn’t on any of the gurus’ agendas. But, almost overnight cell phones are changing the whole network scenario and are threatening to do away with some of the truisms forged by the heat of change in recent years. And it is not just […]

The hungry dream of bread At the beginning of August, Guineans Yaquine Koita (14 years old) and Founde Tounjara (15 years old), decided to address the people of Europe about daily suffering on the African continent and ask for help clambering out of its depths. They climbed into the landing gear of a Belgian plane […]

An ounce of practice is worth a pound of precept Young people are aware of the fact that they understand culture differently. And if that culture nowadays manifests itself, to a large extent, through computers, nothing could be better than to spend a few days shut up in a room full of machines, cables, modems, […]

Nobody sees what you know, but everyone can see what you do Habits and usage in the connected world are changing at great speed. Almost as fast as our difficulty in understanding what is going on on the Internet and learning to move around it with some kind of personal purpose in mind, increases. These […]

Nothing venture, nothing have Hardly five years after the start of the WWW, the interface that has popularized the use of the Internet at a vertiginous rate, the Net has already gained a leading role in the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Its conclusions are far-reaching: it maintains that the […]

There is no better sign of water than to watch it fall Last Friday, 2 July, sociologist Manuel Castells held a meeting in Barcelona with a small group of journalists during which he gave his views on what he called the new economy. Castells is, without doubt, one of the foremost thinkers in the world […]

The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence The growing and –and inevitable– commercialisation of the Internet is giving rise to a rash of theories, and even philosophies, to explain what we are doing there and how we can take financial advantage of it. Books, specialist magazines, symposia, conferences, thematic web pages […]

Buy at a fair but sell at home Even if only a few Spaniards accept the flood of “free” access to the Internet offers there are at the moment, Spanish cyberspace will experience a healthy rise in its population figures. The big telecom operators are practically falling over themselves to saturate media space with their […]

Good questions teach a lot Four months ago en.red.ando began a new experiment, the space called en.medi@ for debate, analysis and research into new media in the Information Society. The number of people taking part in what we define as encounter technology and content generation has been growing slowly, but surely. At the moment, between […]

Rough winds bring high tides In 1996, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE, the biggest and most important in the United States of America) started an ambitious project to look into the reasons why newspapers were losing credibility among the American public. The cornerstone of this project was a comprehensive study which included a […]

Likely lies in the mire , and unlikely gets over it In 1991, 8 million Americans had access to e-mail. In 1997, there were already 67 million. Last year, there were 96 million. This figure could rise to as much as 120 million this year. The vast majority of these connected people get their bit […]

Nothing escapes or gets lost if you build a strong cage The volume of services on the Internet is constantly growing due to the increase in the Internet population as well as the “translation effect”. The widespread use of English in the Net has triggered the enormous increase of digital content over the last year […]

Other people’s problems taste sweet The state of Spanish on the Internet is “getting worse”. According to “El español en el mundo. Anuario del Instituto Cervantes 1999” (“Spanish in the World. The Annual Report of the Cervantes Institute 1999”), the only language that has grown on the Net is English (70% of web pages), followed […]

The present is our only reality One sure sign that the Net is maturing is that the mature are getting into it. Over the last few months we have witnessed a veritable explosion in the number of senior citizens in Spanish-speaking cyberspace. Internet courses for the elderly (anyone over 50) have produced wonderful pages with […]

To die for the sake of appearance is not so rare Three years ago they laughed at the possibility, both publicly and privately, although some of them made sure they were there “just in case”. Two years ago they felt they “had to be there”, although always looking back over their shoulders to keep an […]

What will those that stumble on the plains do when they get to the mountains? The task of schools is to prepare people for life in the world they are going to live in. Today it is clear that the connection between what is taught and that world is being called into question. There is […]

A light purse makes a heavy heart And now, on top of everything else, we are importing portals. Retevision, Spain’s second biggest telecom company, has just sealed a deal with the US search engine Excite to develop a Spanish version of this portal. This way, according to Retevision, the 12.000 subscribers to Iddeo, its service […]

The killer disease of today is not cured by tomorrow’s remedy The latest African upheavals of the malaria vaccine have passed as surreptitiously through the press in the West as a mosquito bite at sunset. At the most important meeting of malaria experts this century, held in Durban less than a month ago, the team […]

Money is a good servant, but a bad master As the XX century draws to a close and the Information Society dawns, Spain has started to bomb Yugoslavia without declaring war and without an explanation from her government as to what new factors have merited military intervention. When the most intelligent thing a lot of […]

One must draw back in order to leap better Over the last fifteen years, I have taken part in numerous debates and forums on the social communication of science. At all of them, the burning questions were, invariably, whether information on the world of science in the mass media is good, bad, sufficient or insufficient; […]

Everyone stretches their legs according to the length of their coverlet Legend has it that Lautaro terrified the horses of the Spanish conquistadors’ by getting thousands of Mapuche Indians to stomp rhythmically with all their might on the ground thereby making the earth tremble. The moment the armoured men landed on the ground, the battle […]

You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs If you are invited to a meeting of women where you are the only man, you might get the feeling that they know something about you that they’ve never told you or, something that they will, almost certainly, never tell you. At least that was how I […]

What good people we are …. as long as we have something to eat As the English often say, in a hundred years’ time we’ll look back at all the things that worry us now and laugh about them. It seems that Telefonica goes along with this philosophy. And, long before a century has passed […]

Where there is suspicion, there is caution Fisher Information” is not a key piece of information that belongs to this gentleman. Quite the opposite in fact. It is the information that is missing from our understanding of how things work. And, according to Fisher, in all the systems that surround us that information deficit exists […]

To free oneself of bonds, a good head is better than good arms Forget artificial intelligence. This season something much more sophisticated and suited to the age is going to be in fashion: “artilects” or artificial intellects which, as usual when describing these devices, will apparently be much more intelligent than us. To start off […]

The king means little to his swineherd The World Economics Forum at Davos, the annual get-together of the rich and powerful on the planet, turned into a Freudian exercise in self-flagellation. For a start there was the title of the meeting: Global Responsibility, quite an ironic one in the mouths of transnational corporation CEOs, high […]

Little strokes fell great oaks The gestation period has been long and the birth a difficult and painful one. Nevertheless, today en.red.ando’s 3.0 version sees the light for the first time, with its new design and enlarged content. As with all newborns, some will say that it’s a beautiful baby and others will not understand […]

Nobody is wise because of what their father knew Can you imagine what it would be like to see all the archives and weekly content of en.red.ando by just taking a glance at your the screen? And finding the article you were looking for by just a couple of clicks and with no need to […]

Don’t say shoo! until the last cat has gone by We are in the portal era. But, let’s see how long it lasts. What is certain is that, at the moment, either you have a portal, or you are in one, or you’re a dead “bit”. And, if this is indeed the case, the situation […]

Never say it’s going to rain until you hear the thunder When there is talk about the future of developing countries in the Information Society, their way out of poverty and backwardness is not only seen as a one-way route established in accordance with criteria laid down by the Industrial Society (See the editorial “From […]

If you don’t have enough for your own good, don’t worry there will be plenty of the bad From the time of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has relied on the country/city dualism. Both concepts have been imbued with cultural, social, economic and political meaning over the last two centuries. “Being from the country” or “being […]

There’s no pain that can’t be soothed As the population on the Internet increases, so does concern about the fate of poor countries in the Information Age. But, as the population on the Internet increases, can we continue to ask the same questions about the relationship between rich and poor countries? Are the unresolved questions […]