If you can look into the seeds of time,     And say which grain will grow and which will not,     Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear     Your favours nor your hate.     -- Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene III, 59-62. [And now for something completely different..

[Note: we thank Professor Floridi for kind permission to reprint this material, which is a shortened version of a paper he gave at a UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995.] Part Three: The Problems In the previous two parts of this article, I argued for an understanding of the Internet as a new stage in the growth of the Human Encyclopedia, and showed how it allows us to do new kinds of research by asking third-level (ideometric) questions about our data

[Note: we thank Professor Floridi for kind permission to reprint this material, which is a shortened version of a paper he gave at a UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995.] Part Two: Ideometry - A New Way of Knowing In the previous part of this article, I argued that the Internet can be understood as a stage in the life cycle of the Human Encyclopedia

[Note: we thank Professor Floridi for kind permission to reprint this material, which is a shortened version of a paper he gave at a UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995.] Part One: Understanding The Internet The Internet: a population of several million people, interacting by means of a global network