really good and useful -- I get something out of it every
time I read it, and it has good addresses too) deals with this whole subject:
"Sooner or later the presence of languages on the Web will reflect their
strength around the world." Depending on the energy of those who speak them.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

How light-headed we felt when we received our first message... coming from
Canada. 10.000 (?) years after the Inuits, our cutters had just discovered
America!

= And your worst experience?

All the sleep I'm missing...

*Interview of June 25, 2000 (original interview in French)

= How did using the hyperlink change your writing?

Surfing the Web is like radiating in all directions (I'm interested in something
and I click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one
click to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the written media, of
course. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my life,
but it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website as you
do for a script or a play.

But it wasn't exactly the Internet that changed my writing, it was the first
model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself Hypercard. I still
remember how astonished I was during my month of learning about buttons and
links and about surfing by association, objects and images. Being able, by just
clicking on part of the screen, to open piles of cards, with each card offering
new buttons and each button opening onto a new series of them. In short,
learning everything about the Web that today seems really routine was a
revelation for me. I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock
when they discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank
Xerox.

Since then I've been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper print-out
only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give somebody who doesn't
like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It's only an approximation,
because print forces us into a linear relationship: the words scroll out page by
page most of the time. But when you have links, you've got a different
relationship to time and space in your imagination. And for me, it's a great
opportunity to use this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a
book gives only a suggestion of it -- a vague one because a book isn't meant for
that.

BRIAN KING

#Director