The title refers to the world wide web designed by Tim Berners-Lee way back in 1989, beginning with 1 page. According to Google, today there are over 1 Trillion such pages.Interestingly the original goal was to help physicists answer questions about the universe and today the web allows pretty much anyone to answer questions about pretty much anything, even such arcana as Yugas. The web was created on a NeXT computer upon which the present Apple Mac is modeled.
The Greek prefix tele named the early space-defeating nature of the first Dwapara devices. Today, it is networks of networks linking people to other people via sight, sound and to a much lesser extent touch (transmitting CNC blueprints say that are built on arrival), with taste and smell for the moment in the laboratory that characterize early Dwapara. The military research on such networks predates the world wide web by 20 years and the first computer virus by 8 years.
It was analyzing real world social networks that lead to the capture of Saddam Hussain and the communications implicit in modern networks are transforming media in the developed world and especially politics elsewhere. For example, in North Korea, anyone can play 'spot the secret base or gulag on Google Earth'. In Iran, the regime cannot suppress news reports. In Georgia , cyber warfare was applied to silence a critic of Russia, unintentionally magnifying the impact of his opinions.
As a youngling, the author would regularly compare news stories in Liberation, El Pais and The Independent, revealing differences both small and large in facts depending on the degree to which the particular country felt concerned with the matter. Such an exercise is vastly simpler, faster and less expensive today, and possible world-wide.
Such early comparisons suggested a blog looking more widely than any one particular group but inevitably that universalist, truth-oriented point of view attracts a tiny coterie of zealous defenders of their particular orthodoxy, their self righteous anger (itself suggesting deep-seated doubts and insecurity in their beliefs) summed up in the French word chauvinism, unreasoning and misplaced partisanship, unsupported by objective facts.
It is amazing that folks get themselves worked up over such dry stuff as three recent comments on themes as offensive as:
1) the desire by the author to see more books and works on Yogananda from SRF archives,
2) that in many churches more people are social networking than looking for God (Krihsna gives the statistics as one in one thousand in the Gita, no less) and
3) that France is not quite the free and liberal place that it appears to idealists (perhaps a quick review of Amnesty International's official reports might provide some perspective).
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