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are underestimating the effect of the Web on information, which still
comes to us through the printed word, or the word that we recognize
and then perhaps print out. Through the ring of associations one gets to
very sophisticated information rather quickly.
Cynthia Colin:
There is a very important project now, which identifies
the lead articles which must be read by psychiatrists on interactions
between oncology, drugs, and psychiatric drugs. People are identifying
the five "must-read" articles, the five "next if you have time" articles,
and the five "don't bother" articles. This is being done internationally
and interlinguistically. It's another way of cutting through this thicket of
journal articles that are out there. And it's all done on the Web.
Guy Burgess:
There are some things the Web does, and other things it
doesn't do. Automated systems which try to do it all basically don't
work very well. Most of our money is going into editors. The mechani–
cal part of getting all the page links wired up is pretty minor. It's the edi–
tors who count. As I mentioned before, I have a friend whose son
needed to do a paper on some exotic tree frog. He researched on the
Web, and got a paper on the tree frog. It was even written in language
that kids could understand. However, it was written by a kindergartner.
One of the problems that we have in conflict resolution is that it is
very hard for people to see how somebody else sees a conflict. They
almost need to step into a different consciousness just to have a sense of
where people are coming from. People tend to assume that those who dis–
agree with them are doing so for evil motives, when they may just be
coming to a decision that would seem reasonable if it were understood.
There are whole series of interventions designed to help people to under–
stand why they believe what they believe, and why others who disagree
with them may not be as evil as they appear (though they may, of course,
still merit opposition). Some of these dialogues involve, for example, dis–
cussions between right-to-life and pro-choice groups. One of the things
that they do is to have a party where they get to talk with each other for
an evening. They also have a bunch of little exercises designed to get
acquainted. The only rule is that you can't talk about your views on
abortion. So everybody gets to know each other as people before they
find out about their fundamental disagreements. While this doesn't
resolve the dispute, it does a lot to make it more constructive.
Edith Kurzweil :
I don't want to change the subject, but I want to com–
ment on something which I have been thinking about ever since Gunther
