I have little difficulty in appreciating the fierce resistance that many thoughtful people, including some of my most eminent friends and associates, manifest when it comes to confronting, trying to understand, and eventually using these new tools as an extension of their own potential. Their reticence and reservations are altogether understandable. Despite the enormous improvements of recent years (and months!, computer-mediated communications are still often rough and uninviting, they often do not do what you would like them to do (at least not the first times around), they invariably involve learning curves (and the flexibility that must go with them), and they are not, of course, a full substitute for smelling, touching and the sorts of more meandering contacts and discourses which often are so important when you are trying to cook up a new idea or project with another person or group. But it also needs to be understood that there is more to this new wave of innovations than just somber text screens of Internet newsgroups and the like. What we have in hand today – with not only pages like these (and better), videoconferencing and a variety of group work technologies – is just the first pale refection of what the very near future will put at our disposal.

Those of us who have over the last decade or more had the opportunity to acquire these tools and work habits on a daily basis are often of little help to those who have yet to make the transition. In laying out this series of Web sites and the program that is The Commons, we have tried to be of some help to those who are making the changeover, but I would also like to recommend a small handful of books which are good reads in themselves, accessible and challenging at the same time, and which, I do believe, can be a great help to anyone who wishes to have a more profound feel for what is going on.

• Being Digital, N. Negroponte, Hodder & Stoughton, 1995
• In the Vineyard of the Text, Ivan Illich, U. Of Chicago Press, 1993
• Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan, New York, Vanguard Press, 1957

Right behind these if you are still hungry for more, I would recommend;

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman, Penguin 1985
• The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1979
• The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin, Concord Ontario, Anansi Press, 1992

Misunderstanding, short-temperedness, even rudeness can be observed all too often in this ephemeral world of electronic communications. It can at times become almost as grossly antisocial as the signs that certain mad drivers, perhaps for the rest altogether civilized citizens, permit themselves to make from the sanctity of their speeding cars to the sinner at the wheel of the parallel vehicle. A quick and vigorous hand sign, an awesome scowl, a less than kind word, and speed on oh righteous Christian.

McLuhan had a lot of things quite right as he looked out into our world of electronics now fully thirty years ago. When he whispered us that the medium was the message, he was quite correct, at least when it comes to the little screen before your eyes this morning. This little square of light will do quite well for some jobs, and not so well for others. And since we risk to depend on it quite extensively in this cooperative venture, let me share with you the following which is born of long practice and careful observation.

This screen does quite nicely for reading and responding to short, preferably single point messages ("Dinner is served", "OK, I'll be right there."), but it is hardly the ideal means for viewing and coming to grips with more complex and longer communications, which really do far better on paper. The 80x25 or whatever screen that is before you, makes us prisoner of its physical limits; we tend to focus on what is right in front of us and become USA Today impatient. Once we get beyond -- absolutely tops! -- two screenfuls, and assuming of course that there is any merit at all in the thing in front of us, it is, thus, time to turn to your printer. One really does have to let eye and mind wander over vaster terrain when it comes to interpreting and profiting from these richer and more challenging communications. Imagine reading Tolstoy screen by screen. Perhaps you too would turn off, scowl and drive right on. No rude sign, of course!

(I contribute the following as someone who has for many years worked in the international arena in half a dozen languages but has mastered none, including his native English. Nonetheless, I have kept my eyes quite open over a career of three decades of international work, and here is what I would share with you on this most important score. As with every point and paragraph of this site, this exposition is put before you for comment, clarification, etc. which can then be used either to reject or remodel what follows, share with others, etc.)

The de facto international language with which we have to deal for the most part on the Web today is of course English. Fortunately however there are other elements of the electronic environment (point to point communications, videoconferencing, etc.) which permit the use of other languages. And in the near future we are certain to see a shift back to a more polyglot world, even on the net, as artificial intelligence and microprocessor capacities catch up with the temporary puzzle of high quality translation and interpretation. Put your ear to the ground and you can hear it coming!

However if English is to be our main means of idea and information sharing (and knowledge building), and given that the participants in all this are coming from places all around the planet where English in not the main language, it is clear that we (on both sides of this linguistic equation, native speakers and others) are gong to have to learn to manipulate the language in a way which permits it to serve its full functions under these rather special circumstances. Here, most briefly, is the technique which we all must learn to master. First, for those of us who have it as our mother tongue, we must learn to express ourselves both succinctly and with a choice of words and expressions that can be clearly understood by all involved. And if we may seem to lose something in the process as we are obliged to forego more or less hot phrases and references which may have meaning to our particular insider group, there will also be compensating advantages. Faced with the need to express ourselves in simple language and not in any sort of code or meta-language, we are put to the harder tests of reasoning and articulation – a certain kind of "back to the drawing board" which can only help us in clarifying our ideas, including to ourselves.

But that is only half of what we have to bring to the party. The other half is that of being at once sufficiently indulgent, cultured and intellectually curious to hang on and try to understand what the non-native speaker may be trying to say… filling in the gaps, as it were. (And believe me friend, sometimes those unfamiliar and 'sounds wrong' kinds of phrases may carry with them insights and knowledge that you and I have never even dreamed of). This is of course the real opposite of linguistic snobbery, and in the process we are not lowering or abandoning our standards, rather we are working with them and articulating them so that they can do some other important jobs of communication within the same powerful and forgiving frame, if only we are willing to work with it in the right way.

Those who are coming at the language from the other side must also show great discipline and forbearance as they prepare and present their ideas, materials and arguments in written form. The emphasis has to be on simplicity and clarity of expression, which almost automatically translates to short, mainly declarative sentences with a choice of vocabulary to match (Strunk and White's deservedly famous, The Elements of Style). My experience shows that this tends to pose the greatest difficulties for people who come from highly articulate discursive cultures (ahem!), and of course for those of us who are perhaps a bit more than averagely in love with the sound of our own resonant voices. But the bottom line truth is that it's good for them, and good for us!

This then is our Faustian deal, and if not so well stated itself nonetheless puts before you an issue of which those of us who work internationally must become ever more aware. Personally, I much regret that our leaders back in 1946 did not have the foresight to understand that what we needed for these purposes was a single rational choice. And that may well not have been English. Indeed, my preferred candidate would have been Italian – on the grounds of its deep history, its importance as a root source for so many other languages, its sheer beauty, and perhaps as important as any of that, the magnificent generosity that virtually every Italian shows to anyone who makes even the most pitiful stab at expressing herself in his most exigent and powerful but, for those of us on the outside at least, most forgiving language. A lesson that many of us English and French speakers have yet to master.