While the Internet represents a real technical revolution, its social and cultural effects, however, seem ambiguous. The view of two experts: Dominique Wolton, who reminds us of the limits of any medium to resolve by itself the problems of communication between people, and Philippe Quéau, who stresses the need to establish a new form of global regulation to ensure fairness and human development in view of the profound inequalities in access to information. People have forever been trying to communicate, and frequently transfer their concern to improve this often disappointing communication to the methods. Thus in the course of a single century, from the telephone to the radio, from television to the computer, and today to the Internet, the methods have continued to improve communication to the extent that many believe the problem has been solved.
Yet the long history of communication reveals four facts: Each new method resolves a previous communication problem, but creates others. No method supplants the previous one, it is just added to others. Communication methods, designed to cut back on the journeys people have to make, have actually had the opposite effect, creating the need for people to meet physically. No one method has been sufficient in itself to change human and social relations radically.
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