Internet History

Technophilia, like progress, is a comfortable disease; it is also, as far as I can tell, only mildly contagious. For all the talk of multimedia as a revolution, making knowledge more accessible than ever, there remain many who are uninfected and unaffected. The new technology has been said to involve a 'democratising process' but, if this is democracy, it is clearly not for everybody.

Nevertheless, only the flippant would dismiss those who surf the net as merely riding on the crest of a fashion. Both schools and academic research projects are showing that multimedia can be used to good effect. One does not need to be tangled up in the World-Wide Web to recognise that it might provide interesting prospects for the historian.