The Internet has proven to be a profound cultural and cognitive revolution, one that has changed our daily life, our research practices and which is changing the content of research itself. This major transformation, taking place before our very eyes, is hardly able to find the space it would deserve in contemporary scientific research, even in those fields, such as cognitive science and artificial intelligence, whose purpose is to study the relationships between artificial and natural systems of information processing. With the exception of a few isolated cases, the “academic” debate in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science has not yet made the Internet a well-established topic of discussion. The end result is that the analysis of a phenomenon of such magnitude often ends up in the hands of technicians or self-styled gurus.

The present article has two aims. On the one hand, to present a programmatic description of how research in cognitive science as well as research on information and communication technology can interact in order to provide a better understanding of the Internet phenomenon. On the other hand, to discuss certain experiences from the “field”, namely virtual conferences, as an example of the successful interaction between the humanities and new technology.

I’d like to approach the question regarding the relationship between research in cognitive science and new technologies by examining two possible directions of interaction:

1. In the first direction, how the advent of the Internet changes our cognitive and cultural practices
2. In the other direction, which research tools in cognitive science can be useful in understanding the Internet

I’ll present some thoughts regarding both of the possible directions of inquiry and conclude my discussion with an analysis of practical research experiments in cultural communication that I carried out in recent years.

1. How the Internet changes our cognitive and cultural practices

1.1 A new culture?

The Internet is a complex geography of information technology, networking, multimedia content and telecommunication. This powerful alliance of different technologies has technological, social, economic and cultural implications. In this article I’d like to focus attention on the cultural significance of the Internet phenomenon, which I consider to be central to the change we’re now witnessing and perhaps the aspect that has least attracted the general public’s attention. From the success and failures of the new economy, (see, for example, the anthology edited by Le cercle des économistes: Espérances et menaces de la nouvelle économie) to the utopian visions and criticisms of the new global society (regarding the utopian view, see Pierre Lévi: World Philosophie; and for the critical position, Philippe Bréton: La parole manipulée) the analyses of the Internet’s impact on society have emerged in step with the rise and fall of the principal players in this new phenomenon.

Despite such analyses, I think that the indelibly profound effect that the Internet has already had on culture, memory, and cultural transmission, has not been studied in sufficient detail, and deserves even greater attention: perhaps the Internet will change neither society nor the economy as one might have thought during its early stages, but it sure to permanently change our relationship with cultural knowledge and memory, just as occurred following the two earlier great cultural revolutions; namely, the introduction of writing and the invention of printing.

In recent years, the Internet has often been compared to a new language or a new culture. In this section I’d like to discuss how such comparisons can be examined from a research perspective, as well as how they can help us reach a better understanding of this phenomenon than those provided by economic and sociological analyses.

From an historical point of view, the Internet is above all a cultural revolution, even prior to being an economic or social one. The “bricks” that make up the Internet (computer networking, electronic mail, the World Wide Web) were developed independently of economic considerations, in contexts dealing with defense or scientific research. This explains why it has been so difficult to find an economic model for business and communication over the Internet. The Internet developed as a language, something one can’t buy or sell, but whose possession can indirectly yield economic or social advantages. Searching for economic models for using the Internet is like searching for economic models for using Italian. Learning Italian can certainly involve economic and institutional aspects, but it is not “Italian” as such that one buys or sells. It’s worthwhile clarifying the sense in which one can speak of the Internet as a new culture.

The Internet is a new culture since it makes available:

1. new means for recording information
2. new means for accessing information
3. new means for recovering information
4. new cultural objects

I’ll examine these four aspects of the new culture of the Internet by adopting a particular perspective regarding culture, one that takes into account cognitive processes.

1.2 Culture and cognition

Cognitive anthropology and distributed cognition can help us rethink the relationships between culture and cognition in a direction that is particularly promising for the examination of new technologies. According to the anthropologist Edward Hutchins, for example, “culture is not a collection of things, whether tangible or abstract, but a process. It’s a human cognitive process that takes place inside and outside of people’s minds [...] It’s an adaptive process that accumulates partial solutions to frequently encountered problems.” This approach to culture, which takes into account cognitive processes, makes it possible, on the one hand, to consider culture as a distributed cognitive process, and on the other hand, to consider cognition as an activity distributed among the members of a culture. This perspective dissolves a traditional distinction in cognitive science between the individual mind and culture as the surrounding environmental context. Cognitive processes are carried out through their distribution among a series of different supports, both internal and external: certain mental representations, internal to the individual and active in inference and reasoning, are clearly “pieces” of culture (e.g. multiplication tables or proverbs); while certain cultural productions, external to individuals, exist only as supports for the resolution of a cognitive problem (e.g. a string tied around one’s finger, or an abacus).

As Hutchins argues, culture accumulates partial solutions to frequently encountered cognitive problems (how to remember an order, calculate a sum, unload the cognitive burden of a “piece of information” in short-term memory, etc.) Successful solutions tend to spread, they’re communicated, become the “culture” of a group, establishing themselves evermore from one generation to the next. We can summarize this general process with a phrase from Dan Sperber: culture is the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population.

1.3 Culture and memory: writing, printing and new technologies

By adopting this perspective, we can view culture as the distributed and enduring memory of a society. The major cultural revolutions in the history of culture have had an impact on the distribution of memory. The Internet is one such revolution. Let’s see in what sense. The Internet has often been compared to the invention of writing or printing. Both comparisons are valid. Writing, introduced at the end of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, is an external memory device that makes possible the reorganization of intellectual life and the structuring of thoughts, neither of which are possible in oral cultures. With the introduction of writing, one part of our cognition “leaves” the brain to be distributed among external supports. The visual representation of a society’s knowledge makes it possible to both reorganize the knowledge in a more useful, more ‘logical’, way by using, for example, lists, tables, or genealogical trees, and to solidify it from one generation to the next. What’s more, the birth of “managerial” casts who oversee cultural memory, such as scribes, astrologists, and librarians, makes possible the organization of meta-memory, that is, the set of processes for accessing and recovering cultural memory.

Printing, introduced to our culture at the end of the 15th century, redistributes cultural memory, changing the configuration of the “informational pyramid” in the diffusion of knowledge. In what sense is the Internet revolution comparable to the invention of writing and printing? In line with these two earlier revolutions, the Internet increases the efficiency of recording, recovering, reproducing and distributing cultural memory. Like writing, the Internet is an external memory device, although different in that it’s “active” in contrast to the passive nature of writing. Like printing, the Internet is a device for redistributing the cultural memory in a population, although importantly different since it crucially modifies the costs and time of distribution. But unlike writing and printing, the Internet presents a radical change in the conditions for accessing and recovering cultural memory with the introduction of new devices for managing meta-memory, i.e., the processes for accessing and recovering memory. Culture, to a large extent, consists in the conception, organization and institutionalization of an efficient meta-memory, i.e. a system of rules, practices and representations that allow us to usefully orient ourselves in the collective memory. A good part of our scholastic education consists in internalizing systems of meta-memory chosen by our particular culture. For example, it’s important to know the basics of rhetoric in order to rapidly “classify” a line of verse as belonging to a certain style, and hence to a certain period, so as to be able to thus efficiently locate it from within the corpus of Italian literature. With the advent of technologies that automate the functions of accessing and recovering memory, such as search engines and knowledge management systems, meta-memory also becomes part of external memory: a cognitive function, central to the cultural organization of human societies, has become automated—another “piece” of cognition thus leaves our brain in order to be materialized through external supports. Returning to the example above, if I have in mind a line of poetic verse, say “Guido, i’vorrei...” but can recall neither the author nor the period, and am unable to classify the style, these days I can simply write the line of verse in the text window of a search engine and look at the results. The highly improbable combination of words in a line of verse makes possible a sufficiently relevant selection of information that yields among the first results the poem from which the line is taken (my search for this line using Google yielded 30 responses, the first ten of which contained the complete text from the poem in Dante’s Rime).

Thus, the mind is not only able to unburden itself of the function of conserving pieces of information, thanks to the existence of passive external memory devices such as writing, but it can also unburden itself of a more complex and crucial function in order to render the conservation of data more efficient, namely, the function of meta-memory. Despite the limitations of current search engines and the “bias” in the selection of results due to commercial interests, today we possess a new technology that automates an important function of our thinking—a function around which we have built up and established a large part of our cultural institutions.

In short, the Internet constitutes a cultural revolution since it increases our possibility of recording information through external interactive memory, modifies the distribution of cultural memory, and creates new tools for accessing and recovering information, thereby automating the cognitive function of meta-memory.

1.4 Culture and communication: new cultural objects

Like any cultural revolution, the Internet changes our cognitive practices by not only transforming the means of information processing, but also by transforming its content. In order to understand the terms in which the introduction of writing changed the modes of thought itself, Jack Goody emphasizes the role played by the introduction of new cultural objects, such as lists or tables, whose use was not immediately “communicative”, but initially classificatory and organizational. The oldest clay tablets found in Mesopotamia, especially in the city of Uruk (3200-3100 BCE) are records of acts of trade or lists of goods. For nearly 700 years writing was used only for this purpose: toward 2500 BCE one witnesses the addition of tablets for educational purposes, primarily the recording of symbols for teaching scribes to read and write.

This new phenomenon is of particular relevance for those interested in the pragmatics of communication: in every communication act, information must undergo cognitive and rhetorical processing in order to pass from a “private”, personal status, to a public one. The official public message is presented in a certain format that establishes the shareable nature of the information. Now, the one and the same informational format—the web page—can contain not only public information, but also completely private information that has not undergone any public “formatting” process. On the web site of an American family from the Midwest, I found posted the ultrasound pictures from the mother’s first months of pregnancy. Although the owner of the picture clearly has the right to make this type of information available to others, we have difficulty acknowledging it as “public” simply in virtue of the fact that it’s been shared. There is some ambiguity in the use of the word ‘public’: on the one hand, what is public is that which is of concern to a community (and in this case, an ultrasound can’t be considered public information, unless it has some particular significance as a scientific document); on the other hand, what is public is that which is accessible to everyone—(if anyone can access the ultrasound belonging to the mother from the Midwest, then in this second sense one can say that it’s a piece of public information). One might object that this allegedly new public use of private information already occurs in traditional mass media, where the public and private domains are often treated as one and the same. One increasingly finds television programs whose only aim is to present to the public the private details of a person or family’s life. From a pragmatic point of view, however, these types of programs use a format that viewers are easily able to distinguish from those that transmit “official” information, which is public in the first sense (such as news programs, or documentaries). In the case of the Internet, this distinction is more subtle, given that the format used for the communication of information, namely the web page, is the same. Moreover, a web page is an informational support that can contain interactive elements, which are also often used in even the simplest personal home pages (elements such as links to one’s own e-mail address for writing a message, counters, internal search tools, and forms). Borrowing an expression from the sociologist Erwin Goffmann, we can say that the addition of interactive elements places the user in the “participation framework” of the communicative event; that is, the user is included among those who have access to the communicative event.

The “do-it-yourself” nature of personal home pages, often constructed using tools available from the same sites that host the pages, or using easily found software such as AdobeGoLive, FrontPage or DreamWeaver, make these cultural objects particularly interesting given the current stage of the Internet’s technological evolution, in the same way that ancient tablets are of interest to archeologists. It’s foreseeable that these pages will, in the future, be completely replaced with standardized formats that are easier to use, but probably also less flexible in terms of the range of personal expression that they allow. For now, they are a rich source of “clues” regarding the communicative behavior of their authors, their “unwitting moves”, to use Goffmann’s terminology—i.e. those behaviors observable by others, though not intentionally communicative—and their rituals of self-presentation to a potentially universal public. The analysis of new cultural objects, among which personal home pages are only one example, can contribute to an interpretation of the Internet revolution that takes into account a “micro” level in understanding the reorganization of information made possible by this new technology.

2. Which tools from cognitive science can help us understand the Internet

I’d like now to move on to the second part of the discussion in order to identify the conceptual tools used in cognitive science that can be useful for understanding new technologies.

2.1 The Internet as a cognitive artifact

A cognitive artifact is a made object or a configuration of the physical or social world around us that allows us to execute a certain cognitive function in a better or simply different way. Examples of cognitive artifacts include a string tied around one’s finger, a shopping list, a line at a movie theatre for noting the order of arrival, a calculator, or a constellation. The cognitive psychologist Donald Norman extends the notion of cognitive artifacts even to mental representations such as proverbs, multiplication tables, etc.; that is, those “pieces” of internalized culture that have a cognitive function (to help remember certain information, or speed up calculations). As Hutchins notes, cognitive artifacts are more than just a set of objects—they constitute a set of processes that produces cognitive effects through the interaction of different structures and supports.

For example, the introduction of writing and the cultural objects that it brought with it, consists in a set of artifacts which, as already seen, modify various cognitive functions such as memory, but also the functions of classifying, categorizing, and calculating. Human beings use to their advantage the artificial and natural structures surrounding them. A cognitive artifact can thus be used, in the case of a made structure, as intended by the one who created it, or set to use for other ends, since it was perhaps shown to have certain advantages in solving cognitive problems that were not foreseen by its creator.

This “extended” notion of cognitive artifact, which takes into consideration complex artificial structures, both physical and social, can be useful for reading the Internet as an artifact.

The Internet is a complex cognitive artifact—a distributed structure having two main components:

1. a nearly unlimited external memory
2. a means of interactive communication possessing a powerful relational capacity

Due to the complexity of the combination of technologies underlying the geography of the Internet, there is no single project or design for this highly complex artifact that could determine in advance all of its possible uses. The opportunities of action and interaction that the Internet provides lead to certain uses that are not always foreseeable (as we saw in the case of personal home pages).

2.2 Cognitive artifacts and affordances

The notion of affordance, introduced by James Gibson, describes the reciprocal relationship between an organism and its surrounding environment. An affordance is a resource that the environment “offers” to an organism that possesses the appropriate cognitive systems for grasping it. It’s an “invitation” by the environment to make use of it in a certain direction. The notion was taken up again in the context of cognitive ergonomics, especially by Donald Norman, for explaining which invitations, or suggestions for use, lie at the basis of the interactions between a cognitive artifact and its users. Each artifact has a certain number of affordances that depend upon the intentions of the designer (in the case of cognitive artifacts that are designed), and others that depend upon the historical and cultural contingencies in which the artifact was made (the material of which it’s composed, its physical shape, its abstract configuration). What are the Internet’s affordances? As stated above, the Internet is an artifact having two principal components, one that is mnemonic and the other that is relational. In our interactions with the Internet, we make use of its mnemonic and relational affordances, specifically:

1. We search for information
2. We expect that the content we seek will be communicated in a form that’s relevant to us, as would be communicated by any person from whom we asked for information

The Internet’s mnemonic affordance, the invitation to make use of it as an information warehouse, places constraints on possible content that will successful on the network. For example, the phenomenon of “banner blindness”, closely studied by usability experts, in which banner ads on web pages are not perceived by users, could be explained by the constraints resulting from this specific affordance of the web.

The Internet’s relational affordance appeals to our ability to attribute intentionality. As has been shown in a number of cognitive studies, human beings have a spontaneous ability for attributing intentionality, that is, for interpreting the surrounding world in terms of intentions, beliefs, and desires. The systems that call on this spontaneous ability, often denoted under the rubric of Folk Psychology or Theory of Mind, are not necessarily prompted by anthropomorphic stimuli, even if the evolution of an ability of this type is most likely the result of selective pressure towards reading the behavior of other human beings. In fact, the informational configurations that fulfill the conditions as inputs for our systems of intentional attribution can be very different from the informational configurations of human beings. The experimental protocols used for studying people’s spontaneous mentalization present subjects with highly abstract stimuli lacking all reference to a human agent. Fulvia Castelli, Uta Frith, Chris Frith and Francesca Happé , for example, recently used an experimental protocol in which two animated triangles executed a series of movements through space. The verbal and neurological responses of normal and autistic subjects were measured. Normal subjects spontaneously attributed complex intentional interactions to the two triangles, such as the desire to surprise the other one, hide, fight, etc. Only those with autism, those having a specific deficit in mentalizing, saw the interactions between the two triangles as simple random movements.

The Internet is a type of informational configuration that appeals to our mentalization response. In every interaction with the system, we attribute intentionality and expect the system to react in the same relevant manner as any human agent would react (that is, by “adjusting” its response to our request). The system’s perceived intentionality is a property distributed in the Internet’s complex geography.

This can help explain the success of certain types of communication formats found in the Internet, and the lack of success of others. For example, a very standard web site format that appropriately uses both of the affordances I’ve described is that of “community” sites. These sites allow users having a common interest or problem to share a database of information and communicate with others (e.g. sites for mountain biking enthusiasts, or for those suffering from hypertension). This type of design usually makes the best use of the system’s affordances, making possible both the search for relevant information and interaction with similarly motivated people. Moreover, these sites offer a particularly useful integration of these two properties by way of forums: here, people usually exchange messages regarding a specific topic, but unlike a mailing list, the history of the communicative interactions is not lost and can instead serve as further information for new users. Forums often include a rich population of “passive” participants who regularly read messages simply to remain informed rather than take part in the interactions—just as in real contexts where we can come in contact with other people, not in order to communicate with them, but simply to inquire of them (e.g. when we request information about a timetable, or listen to a lecture).

With these examples I’d like to suggest a direction of research that to me seems quite promising: an analysis of the Internet phenomenon in light of the conceptual tools developed in cognitive science.

3. The humanities online: our experience

3.1 The idea of a virtual conference

Euro-edu, an association of researchers in the humanities for the development of research/action projects regarding scientific communication online, was born out the type of programmatic reflections outlined above. Our objective is two-fold: to put into practice our experience in the humanities and in the organization of research in order to make better use in our work of the Internet’s potential; and to produce “cognitive artifacts” designed expressly for research in the humanities, and which can contribute to the inevitable changes in research methods that are already taking place.

In particular, we think that the World Wide Web’s use within the humanities is still in a very primitive stage. The majority of research institutions use their web sites as brochures that provide practical information, describing a bit about the institution’s history, the staff, research teams, current research projects, etc. The web site is thus seen as a space for information and not as a space for interaction with other researches and the potential public. And even in the case of the purely informative use of the Web, the organization of information is often left to the initiative of staff. The personal pages of researchers are often much better than their institution’s own pages, provided it is has any—which is not always the case. Even if e-mail quickly became an essential tool for researchers, and even if searching for references and information on the Internet is by now common practice, the communicative potential of web sites is greatly under-exploited, as is their flexibility in handling different textual formats: from scientific articles to conferences, and from online publishing to archiving. The research community has been using the Internet for a considerable time, well before the commercial explosion of the new economy and the multiplication of web sites: lists, newsgroups, ftp transfer protocols all made possible, since the Internet was first launched, important scientific exchanges as well as the transmission, sharing and archiving of research articles. Within this context, web sites are often seen as a simple decorative tool that adds nothing to the exchange of information, one that is more suited to commercial than to research activities.

Our proposal is to work towards changing the current state of things. The Web is a unique mix of computer science, networking technology, and multi-media content. It requires a new effort for reflecting upon the use and format of information, a reflection that can’t be carried out only on a theoretical level, nor only on a practical one. Understanding the demands of research as well as the general Web culture extends beyond the abilities of any one person working alone, and instead calls for new forms of teamwork and action.

Our research/action focuses on a well-established cultural practice in scientific communication, namely the research conference. It seemed to us that this cultural practice could prompt interesting reflections regarding scientific communication online, in light of some of its basic features:

• A conference consists in a certain number of written and publicly presented texts by a panel of speakers.
• Each session of a conference usually involves a speaker and one or more discussants, who at times have already read an early version of the text presented and can thus offer informed comments.
• Following the discussants’ comments, or before depending on the situation, others attending the lecture can ask questions.
• The speakers, the discussants and the public share above all a common interest, an aim of research, which is the very reason itself for their presence all at the same place.
• Like every highly interactive experience, a conference will be successful if, beyond the (indispensable) quality of the texts, the interactions between the participants and the public are dynamic and positive. Ideally, they should allow one to acquire new information and new perspectives. A conference is also an opportunity for meeting people with whom one shares the same research interests. One returns from a conference feeling satisfied if it fostered new encounters, inspired new ideas or research projects.
• Being physically present at a conference is not always evident since not everyone can easily move about between cities: students who can’t be reimbursed by their universities; women with small children; people who live far away or in poor countries have even greater difficulty.

The Internet offers the possibility of organizing a conference that corresponds to this description. As I tried to show in section 2 of this paper, the Internet is both an instrument for information and interaction. But it is above all an instrument that makes possible a new alliance between information and interaction: indeed, interactions on the Internet leave a trace in collective memory. Verbal discourse leaves no definite trace, and its recording only leaves a trace that isn’t interactive. With the Internet, information becomes at once a dynamic element and a traceable mark. The Internet seems to have all the traits for perfectly lending itself to the conference format, and it’s our conviction that the Internet can improve many of its practical aspects.

• Participants can read texts at their own pace. The lack of clear delivery on the part of a speaker, or a moment of inattention or distraction, does not interfere with one’s understanding of the discussion.
• Comments are of higher quality: participants reread their remarks before sending them, and can at times change the tone of an overly emotional comment, or reformulate a question that’s difficult to understand.
• The short-lived nature of conference discussions is overcome: all comments remain posted, accessible for future discussions or simply for the readers’ information.
• The international scope of the conference is easily expanded
• Shy students, people reluctant to speak in front of others or in a foreign language, can find a way of speaking in public without the embarrassment of doing it “live” in a lecture hall.

3.2 Text-e

In this way came about our first experience with a virtual conference: www.text-e.org. The conference was carried out by a very mixed team: a group of researchers in the humanities; a team from the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and a startup, GiantChair, that took care of broadcasting the editorial content in electronic format. Given that the topic chosen was the transformation of writing brought about by new technologies, the virtual conference was at the same time the instrument with which the topic was discussed, and the object of the discussion itself.

We invited ten authors from very different writing backgrounds—from journalism to history, from philosophy to the cognitive sciences—to share their views on what the Internet had changed and was going to change in the different writing domains. We convinced them to use the Internet for discussing their texts, and asked other scholars to respond using the site. We made each text available to the public in three versions—English, French and Italian—and in three different formats, one of which was eBook. Each text was thus available on the site in nine different “virtual incarnations”: an effort that was made possible by our sponsor, the company GiantChair, who created the site and provided its expertise on eBooks. During the five months that the conference lasted, we monitored and moderated the debates which were open to the general public. The result is text-e: an ensemble of texts in various formats that materialize a social and cultural practice, the conference, by retracing it in certain respects, or by reinventing it in others; a new object, a cultural hybrid, that each comment modified in a self-referential manner. All those who participated in this experience were at the same time actors and observers of a change, made possible by the Internet, in a cultural practice that took place before our eyes.

On average 3,500 people regularly visited the site every two weeks in order to read new texts. The site received more than 100,000 visits; 780 people registered in order to participate in the debates; and nearly 5,000 downloaded eBooks for a total of almost 15,000 electronically transferred books. The archived debates contain 628 comments and questions sent by those invited to the debates, the speakers and all those who participated in text-e. But what do these numbers say? To what can they be compared? The number of printed copies of a book? The circulation of a journal? The traffic of other web sites? The novelty of this experiment renders the final analysis both difficult and stimulating. It is clear, however, that this experiment was an intellectual success: that of having united a theoretical reflection to a new practical use—a form for presenting a discourse on the Internet that allows the immediate testing of its hypotheses.

3.3 The project www.interdisciplines.org

The success of www.text-e.org encouraged us to examine in more detail the format of virtual conferences on the Web as a possible model for interactive publication in the humanities. The subsequent project is a sort of “generalization” of the idea for Text-e, that is, an artifact designed for carrying out a large number of virtual conferences: it is the site www.interdisciplines.org on which you are now reading this text.

The aim of www.interdiscipines.org is to become the site that serves as the point of reference for research and communication in the humanities, especially for discussions on “frontier” interdisciplinary topics that often have difficulty finding adequate space in the institutional framework. A meeting point for dynamic and intellectually rich research communities scattered throughout the world that do not have the opportunity of getting together, or lack appropriate publication channels. A true “hybrid” that melds into one the features of a journal with those of “Conference Centers” as well as aspects of classic Internet forums.

The project’s main goal is to explore hybrid forms that bring together research and publication, and that are characteristic of the Internet: forms that extend beyond the simple transposition into this new medium of the traditional means of scientific communication.

Since Robert Darnton’s famous article on the pyramidal book, the humanities have not stopped stoking the debate over new possibilities that the Internet offers for publishing and distributing information. But the majority of the analyses, including Darnton’s, begin with pre-existing formats of scientific publication—monographs, academic journals—and seek to understand how these formats can be produced on the Internet.

My view regarding the discussion of these formats is that it’s often difficult to free oneself from the “pre-Internet” mental model that we have of them (on this point, see Robert Casati’s discussion of the ontology of books on www.text-e.org). And it is these very pre-conceptions that often block a freer and more open reflection upon truly new forms for the circulation of information.

For example, the emphasis placed on the contrast between the enduring nature of printed writing versus the volatility of electronic writing, seems to be based on naive intuitions that depend more on bad mental habits than on the actual state of things. We well know that it’s not the printing, nor the publication, that renders a text durable and traceable, but rather its credibility, the authoritativeness of the publisher, as well as on-going editorial investment (e.g., the willingness to update an edition, or to publish a new edition). A poorly edited book by a run-of-the-mill editor will disappear within a few months, and finding it years later on a friend’s bookshelf is not a sign of its durability. The same is occurring on the Internet: a “durable” site is one that becomes a point of reference because it offers quality information, and is not only continuously “updated”, but also continuously “edited”, reviewed, improved, and adapted to the needs of its public.

Clearly, to these are added the characteristic traits of credibility for information found on the web, for example: the usability of a site is an indication of its authoritativeness. In designing www.interdisciplines.org, great attention was paid to its usability—the choice of clear and simple graphics, ease in accessing texts and writing messages.

The site was designed to maximize the usability not only for users/readers, but also for the various conference organizers. Each conference, after having been approved by the scientific committee, can be managed by a research group with relative autonomy (see, for example, the two projects on line at this time: Art and Cognition; and The Future of Web Publishing). The “back office” site (the administrator’s interface) is as easy to use as the public site: the organizer of a given conference can monitor messages just for that conference; customize the conference page (with text and images); create a conference specific bibliography; and communicate with a subset of users of interdisciplines.org who are only interested in that conference.

The URL of each comment was designed in such a way as to be easily reproduced and indexed, so that participants who sent messages to the forum can refer to them in other texts or bibliographies.

The task of reflecting upon and conceptualizing cultural practices, as well as designing projects for the web, can only be carried out by working in a team that possesses a variety of skills. As researchers in the humanities, we worked side by side with designers from the company Gyoza who produced our site, providing continuous feedback in both directions based on our experience in research and their experience in web design.

3.4 Comments: time and interactivity

Time plays a crucial role in the success of virtual conferences. Time is a fundamental aspect of any type of communication, from daily newspapers, to television, to weekly magazines, as indicated in the contribution to text-e by the French journalist Bruno Patino.

The pace of publication and constraints regarding the time window within which one can respond to a debate, make it possible to maintain a high threshold of attention within a certain interval of time. Who hasn’t found an interesting link on the web, added it to their Favorites folder, only to let six months pass before returning to it, provided it still exists? In our virtual conferences, the texts, once published for discussion, remain accessible on the web, but are no longer open to discussion after a certain period of time (two weeks for Text-e, while for interdisciplines the time frame depends upon the conference). This encourages visitors to read the texts as soon as they’re available and to try to respond within the time allowed.

Moderating messages, inviting discussants to respond, in short the a latere interactions of the web, are what guarantee the quality of a discussion of a publication during a conference. This shows how the Internet does not “invent” interactivity: it simply appeals to expectations—expectations that are often disappointed because the activity that takes place by way of the site is not interactive from the outset. The distinction is important: interactivity is one of the properties most referred to in defining the Internet in contrast to other media. Yet it’s not always clear what this means. For example, when one speaks of the interactive design of web pages one refers to the technical possibility of inserting elements (such as a form, or a link) that let the user change the state of the overall system (the site and the activity that the site represents, whether commercial or communicative). For example: completing and sending a form will trigger a subsequent series of automatic actions, such as the sending of an e-mail to one’s own address, or the addition of a data point to the sites statistical analyses of its visitors. For each site one can thus define a “threshold of interactivity,” namely the level to which users’ actions modify the state of the system. In the case of the site www.amazon.com, we can define the threshold of interactivity as the purchasing of a book.

There is another sense in which one can speak of interactivity on line, namely in terms of the potential for putting people in contact who share common interests or research objectives. To take the example of Amazon.com, the possibility of writing a review of a book is an interactive element in this sense. Obviously, this second type of interactivity will depend upon the needs, expectations, and practices of the community that’s called on to interact. The academic community, with its strong tradition of communication and its use of the written text as a means of communication, was an ideal community for bringing to life the interactive potential of the Internet. Yet it is not easy making interactive tools available that create interactivity in the second sense I defined.

In summary, these experiences in designing new cultural objects is just one example, among others, of how bringing together reflections upon cognitive and social practices with reflections on new technologies, can produce new formats that reveal something about the nature of these practices and their process of transformation due to technological changes.