Over the years, I asked people I was interviewing by email how they would define cyberspace and information society. Here are a few answers, to open new perspectives that will happily replace a "conclusion" for this book.
According to Peter Raggett, head of the Central Library at the OECD (Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development): "Cyberspace is that area 'out there' which is on the other end of my PC when I connect to the internet. Any ISP (Internet Service Provider) or webpage provider is in cyberspace as far as his users or customers are concerned." And the information society? "The information society is the society where the most valued product is information. Up to the 20th century, manufactured goods were the most valued products. They have been replaced by information. In fact, people are now talking of the knowledge society where the most valuable economic product is the knowledge inside our heads."
Steven Krauwer is the coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies). "For me the cyberspace is the part of the universe (including people, machines and information) that I can reach from behind my desk." And the information society? "An information society is a society: (a) where most of the knowledge and information is no longer stored in people's brains or books but on electronic media; (b) where the information repositories are distributed, interconnected via an information infrastructure, and accessible from anywhere; (c) where social processes have become so dependent on this information and the information infrastructure that citizens who are not connected to this information system cannot fully participate in the functioning of the society."
Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. For him, cyberspace is "literally the newest frontier for mankind, a place where everyone can claim his place, and do so with relative ease and a minimum of financial resources, before heavy intergovernmental regulations and taxation finally set in. But then, there will be another."
Henk Slettenhaar is a professor in communication technologies at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. For him, cyberspace is "our virtual space. The area of digital information (bits, not atoms). It is a limited space when you think of the spectrum. It has to be administered well so all the earth's people can use it and benefit from it (eliminate the digital divide)." And the information society is "the people who already use cyberspace in their daily lives to such an extent that it is hard to imagine living without it (the other side of the divide)."
Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux. "Cyberspace to me is the distance that is bridged when individuals use technology to connect, either by sharing information or chatting. To say that one exists in cyberspace is really to say that he has eliminated distance as a barrier to connecting with people and ideas." And the information society? "The information society to me is the tangible form of Jung's collective consciousness. Most of the information resides in the subconsciousness but browsing technology has made the information more retrievable which in turn allows us greater self-knowledge both as individuals and as human beings."
CHRONOLOGY
[Each line begins with the year or the year/month.]
1968: ASCII is the first character set encoding. 1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library. 1974: The internet takes off. 1977: UNIMARC is created as a common bibliographic format for library catalogs. 1984: Copyleft is a new license for computer software. 1990: The web is invented by Tim Berners-Lee. 1991/01: Unicode is a universal character set encoding for all languages. 1993/01: The Online Books Page is a list of free ebooks on the internet. 1993/06: Adobe launches PDF, Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat. 1993/11: Mosaic is the first web browser. 1994: The first library website goes online. 1994: Bold publishers post free digital versions of copyrighted books. 1995/07: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore. 1995: Mainstream print newspapers and magazines launch their own websites. 1996/03: The Palm Pilot is launched as the first PDA. 1996/04: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web. 1996: Teachers explore new ways of teaching using the internet. 1997/01: Multimedia convergence is the topic of a symposium. 1997/04: E Ink begins developing a technology called electronic ink. 1997: Online publishing begins spreading. 1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free. 1998/05: 00h00.com sells books "only" in digital format. 1998: Library treasures like Beowulf go online. 1999/09: The Open eBook (OeB) format is created as a standard for ebooks. 1999/12: Britannica.com is available for free on the web (for a short time). 1999: Librarians become webmasters. 1999: Authors go digital. 2000/01: The Million Book Project wants to digitize one million books. 2000/01: Gemstar TV-Guide International buys the 00h00.com. 2000/02: yourDictionary.com is a major language portal. 2000/03: Mobipocket focuses on readers (software) and ebooks for PDAs. 2000/07: Non-English-speaking internet users reach 50%. 2000/07: Stephen King (self-)publishes a novel "only" on the web. 2000/08: Microsoft launches its own reader (software) and LIT format. 2000/09: GDT is a main bilingual (English, French) free translation dictionary. 2000/09: Numilog is an online bookstore selling "only" digital books. 2000/09: Handicapzero is a portal for the visually impaired and blind community. 2000/10: The Public Library of Science works on free online journals. 2000/10: Distributed Proofreaders helps in digitizing books from public domain. 2000/10: Gemstar TV-Guide International launches the Gemstar eBook. 2000/11: The British Library posts the digitized Bible of Gutenberg. 2001/01: Wikipedia is a main free online cooperative encyclopedia. 2001: Creative Commons works on new ways of respecting authors' rights. 2003/09: MIT offers its course materials for free in its OpenCourseWare. 2004/01: Project Gutenberg Europe is launched as a multilingual project. 2004/10: Google launches Google Print to rename it Google Books later on. 2005/04: Amazon.com buys Mobipocket, its software and ebooks. 2005/10: The Open Content Alliance works on a universal public digital library. 2006/08: Google Books has several partner libraries and publishers. 2006/08: The union catalog WorldCat is available for free on the web. 2006/10: Sony launches its new reading device, the Sony Reader. 2006/12: Microsoft launches Live Search Books (and drops the project later on). 2007/03: Citizendium works on a main "reliable" online cooperative encyclopedia. 2007/03: IATE is the new terminological database of the European community. 2007/05: The Encyclopedia of Life will document all known species of animals and plants. 2007/11: Amazon.com launches Kindle, its own reading device. 2008/05: Hachette Livre buys the digital bookstore Numilog. 2008/10: Google Books settles a lawsuit with associations of authors and publishers. 2008/11: Europeana starts as the European digital library. 2009/02: Amazon.com launches Kindle 2.