| |
Racism on the Internet |
 |
The internet can be regarded as a mirror of the variety of interests, attitudes and needs of human kind. Propaganda and disinformation in that way have to be part of it, whether they struggle for something good or evil. But the classifications do no longer function.
During the last years the internet opened up a new source for racism as it can be difficult to find the person who gave a certain message into the net. The anarchy of the internet provides racists with a lot of possibilities to reach people which they do not possess in other media, for legal and other reasons.
In the 1980s racist groups used mailboxes to communicate on an international level; the first ones to do so were supposedly the  Ku Klux Klan and mailboxes like the Aryan Nations Liberty Net. In the meantime those mailboxes can be found in the internet. In 1997 about 600 extreme right websites were in the net, the number is growing, most of them coming from the USA. The shocking element is not the number of racist pages, because still it is a very small number compared to the variety of millions of pages one can find in this media, it is the evidence of intentional disinformation, the language and the hatred that makes it dangerous.
A complete network of anti-racist organizations, including a high number of websites are fighting against racism. For example:
 http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x32/xr3257.html
http://www.aranet.org/
http://www.freespeech.org/waronracism/files/allies.htm
http://www.nsdapmuseum.com
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Racism.asp
|
|
 |
|
World Wide Web (WWW)
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.
According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.
World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
 http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
|
|
|
