"Re-Inventing Europe: Old Communities and New, 
Real Communities and Virtual."

James J. O'Donnell
Professor of Classical Studies and
Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing
University of Pennsylvania

WESS and its history:

Twenty years is a blip in geologic time; an eon in Internet time.  Ten years ago, it was a technical chore, a guy thing, to hook up a 2400 baud modem or to connect a PC with an overhead screen.  But the old vision, of twenty years ago or ten years ago - to render distances irrelevant to scholarly communication and interaction -, remains alive and well, as data, voice, and video will converge in single broadband pipes.  The technology will make it possible to do this within the next ten years.  Everything we say in 1999 about the future of technology needs to be conditioned by knowing that the great 90's revolution of "the net" will soon be upended again by the revolution of "convergence".

Meanwhile, we continue to train graduate students in the hunter-gatherer traditions of our elders, deriving from a long tradition of theorizing information as a scarce and precious resource.  But already even a generation ago there was too much information for one person or a group of persons to make coherent sense of.  What does "too much information" mean? For instance, in the next century, how will a student of the history of the Clinton Administration deal with the primary-source paper trail, to say nothing of the electronic trail?   In the search for the appropriate metaphor, the scuba-diving approach to information retrieval is replacing that of surfing for information.  One dives into a sea of information. (It's still true that information is not fungible, and that if I want a particular person's phone number, finding somebody else's phone number does me no good.  But in the aggregate, more and more often, our problem is abundance, not scarcity.)

I am prone to liken the infovisionaries of the 1990s to the liberal democrats of Europe of the 1890s.  They knew exactly what they wanted: more education for more people, leading to a culture of Brahms-loving, poetry reading workers and artists.  It would be fun to go back in a time machine to a Viennese coffee house and try to explain "heavy metal" to them.  We suffer, undoubtedly, from similar blindnesses. Democratization of information-providing doesn't just mean the expansion of traditional resources and values, but much more.  There is surely no guarantee that our treasured institutions will either survive or, if they survive, be as central to a dominant culture as they now are.  There are still coffee houses in Vienna, but it's not 1900 any more . . .

Europe past and future:

Europe is a historical, not a geographic/geological concept.  To the ancients, Europe was "the land across the water", from the perspective of the Greeks in Ionia (Asia Minor), the center of Greek civilization before the rise of Athens and Sparta.  In Greek mythology Zeus, in the form of a white bull, carried the Phoenician
princess Europa across the Aegean to the island of Crete.  The sea is a boundary, but does this boundary separate or join?  They, especially water boundaries, can be scenes of intense human activity.  If we keep an aquatic metaphor going and think of cyberspace as not empty space but a rich and populated ocean, all
the better to think of it as a binding space.

The Oxford English Dictionary, defines our Europe as "the place of origin", in seventeenth to nineteenth-century terms.  It gains its identity from being the place where colonists came from.  But in spite of the European Community, Europe is basically incoherent.  If Europe is seen as a community, then, for example, denizens of the Canary Islands and the Ural Mountains are presumed to have something in common, and Finns and Sicilians are part of the same community.   But Europe's history is full of conflict among its inhabiting groups.  Edward Gibbon meant, in his Rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to caution Europe that the consequence of continued disunity and foreign invasion therefrom could be mosques in Britain, which there now are, but from different reasons.

Another example of cultural penetration of Europe is the Beanie Baby.  As the Beanie empire expands, each new country is represented by one of them, uniform in shape and overall appearance, but clothed in national regalia, for example Britannia, prominently clothed in the Union Jack and reflecting the national pride of the British in their flag.  On the other hand, there is also a "Germania," but since flag-waving in Germany doesn't enjoy a spontaneous sense of pride, there is a sense of discomfort in outfitting the Beanie Baby with the black-red-gold flag - and yet that brand new Beanie is almost impossible to find:  somebody is buying them!

Might we be seeing, in the European Community, the end of Europe the cultural/historical entity?  The examples of mosques in Britain and the Beanie Babies' success in Europe even cause us to challenge our assumptions about European Studies.  Who, for instance, studies the subject of non-European trends and cultures (e.g., mosques and Beanie Babies) penetrating Europe?  European-studies scholars? Cross-cultural studies scholars?  Islamic historians or American cultural-studies scholars? "European Studies" must now include studies of the presence of multiple non-European cultures inside the European theater.

And what of the future of community?  The community as a geographic entity or expression is becoming a world of the past.  World-Wide-Web technology makes it possible to create, at any spot in the world, a community of people scattered around the world.  For instance, the lonely Pacific island of Niue (east of Tonga, south of Samoa, a protectorate of New Zealand) has an economy that depends now not only on tourism but the export of domain names.  The country code (.nu) happens to be the Swedish word for "now", and so it offers a serious home for many Swedish businesses (try www.volvo.nu, for example), but it has so far escaped the attention of the armies of Redmond, and www.microsoft.nu is a parody of a more famous site. My point is that technological capabilities can create a community of shared interests from many geographic entities.

A major future determinant of community will be language, not only languages as we speak them now but as they come to be spoken in the future.  No longer spoken as such, Latin has, however, transformed itself into the native languages of southwestern Europe and almost all of Central and South America.  Today as many people speak English as a second language as those who speak English as a native language.  English will become the world's lingua franca and hence the native langauge of ever more people.  The appearance of imperialism that rides with English will surely fade as dramatically as did the appearance of Roman imperialism in the Romance language realms.

One might have thought, a hundred years ago, that religion would fade as a basis of community-building, but the coincidence of geography, language, and religion around the homelands of Islam suggests that religion-as-community-maker will be with us for a while yet.  But as I suggested before, those communities will intermingle geographically in unprecedented ways.  Go, for example, in Paris to the neighborhood along the Seine where a hundred years ago Parisians built the "cimitière des chiens", the final resting place for the favored pets of the city.  The cemetery still functions, but the surrounding neighborhood now is strikingly middle eastern in culture and street life:  vital and cheerful, but quite unlike the Paris of 100 years ago.

Technology and its discontents:

So is technology destiny?   Does technological invention beget a congruent civilization?   The link is looser than we think.  Technologies exist independent of peoples' willingness to use them.  Paper and the printed word existed before Gutenberg, for example.

And at first books were as much collections of manuscripts as they were a broader medium.  Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the new medium contains the old, and much more, and often metaphorically.  E-mail is a metaphor and is used the same way as printed or handwritten letters are.  But e-mail offers so much more than one person sending a message to another:  the name we give it probably blinds us to at least some of the possibilities of the medium.

But in the end, we choose our tools to achieve our cultural goals -- and only then discover what the tools can do and what they make of the wielders.  The challenge for those of us who define ourselves as students of the European past and present is to know what is meant by Europe - but also to know who we ourselves are, who our colleagues and students are, and to think first of the values that we cherish and only then of the incidental manifestations of those values in the ever-changing sea of information in which we swim and dive.

Notes from the discussion period
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