@AOYyIIay ap yOIEG

THE LAW
®

Internet policy is hard to enforce, but there is no harm in thinking it through. On the other hand, whatever order there is in
the Net is generally the result of focused self-organisation: namely that the elements that constitute the medium, technol-
ogy, market, infrastructure, policy and consumers, fall into place rather quickly and often better than expected. The focus
comes from recognising and applying best practice rather than on imposing “law and order".

That being said, there may be a kind of “natural law of TV" which is rewritten by the predictable development of “Web-TV":

1, TVis a collective form of consciousness, one of the best the world has ever known;

2 TV is not meant to be interactive (however, it can handle interactivity, albeit rather clumsily);

3." Everybody a broadcaster" has become a truism. Posting anything on line combines the merits of broadcasting with
the targeted pertinence of a private conversation;

4. TV creates its own large-scale communities not by encouraging interpersonal dialogues but by providing common
references and common values (even speciality channels Suggest a trend to refining and specifying common values
for “critical communities");

5. TV is necessary to local as well as global cohesion so the medium needs protection.

WebTV (or whatever name the genre will eventually go by) bears much more evidence of TV's maturation as a medium than
either HDTV or digital TV. Indeed, digitisation affects all media to homogenise their substance and allow convergence. TV
is no exception. Digitisation swallows all contents and Supports today, the way literacy and the press did before. High
Definition is not TV's, but cinema's destiny. HD is slow in coming to TV precisely because definition is not the quality peo-
ple require of TV first. Like the Internet, what TV wants and gets is ubiquity. WebTV has the merit of combining the advan-
tages of both dominant media of our time: the connectivity of the Internet and the collectivity of television. Both are also
screen-based media which displace the locus of information-processing from the head to the screen. The mind is emi-
grating from the privacy of the head to engage into new forms of association and behaviours, Beyond the technological
paradigm shift lies a fundamental psychological restructuring, as has always been the case when a major new medium
reached a critical mass of human processors. As we move on-line en masse and individually, as we rely more and more on
organised networked data for instant quality information and knowledge, as we connect more and more with like-minded
people in just-in-time associations, we are going soon to recognise that we all belong to one or many more network sup-
ported "mental" communities. This is much more than the "virtual" ones we have been told to expect because mind com-
munities are based on human relationships rather than on technology. So we will use WebTV to carve our own networks in
the collective offerings of larger psychological communities of mind.

SO WHAT KIND OF POLICY CAN WE CONSIDER FOR THAT NEW PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY ?

1. There should be no restriction about webcasting other than those which are covered by the local laws of decency
and good neighbourly conduct (on the Net, the whole world is your neighbour) in any civilised country.

2 Likewise, the local legal provisions preventing the criminal spreading of false rumours or warmongering should suf-
fice to allow for a measure of control of wilfully untrue declarations or pronouncements on-line.

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