. Will all the people working in the print media be able to
get training and retraining in new technologies, or will they be violently hit
by unemployment?

9.4. The Information Society

Jean-Paul, a French musician and writer, wrote in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:

"[...] surfing on the Web operates in rays (I have a centre of interest and I
methodically click on all the links included in home pages) or in hops and jumps
(from one click to another, as they appear). Of course, it is possible with the
print medium. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my
life, but my writing. You don't write the same way for a site as for a script, a
play, etc."

He also notes that all the Internet functionalities could already be found in
the first Macintosh, which revolutionized the relationship between the user and
the information.

"It is not the Internet which changed the way I write, it is the first Mac that
I discovered through the self-learning of Hypercard. I still remember how
astonished I was during the month when I was learning about buttons, links,
surfing by analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on one
area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of cards, and each card
could offer new buttons and each button opened on to a new range, etc. In brief,
the learning of everything on the Web that today seems really banal, for me it
was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same shock when they
discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank Xerox).

Since then I write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only
occasionally, to fix up a text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the
screen a kind of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate.
It's only an approximation, because print forces us to have a linear
relationship: the text is developing page after page (most of the time), whereas
the technique of links allows another relationship to the time and the space of
the imagination. And, for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into
practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book gives only
an idea - which is vague because the book is not conceived for that."

A very important factor too is the radical change between the book culture and
the digital culture. Moving from one to the other as we are doing now deeply
changes our relationship to knowledge, because we move from stable