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languages on the Internet – mainly French, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Russian,
Arabic, Bengali and Portuguese. Specialists predict that in 2007, Mandarin will
exceed the 50% mark in terms of Internet content. 3 The Web will soon become a
Tower of Babel – in other words, multilingual, as it is already, but more equally
balanced.
In 2006, UNESCO stated 4 that more than 90% of languages have not yet appeared
on the Internet, and about 3 000 languages will disappear if we do not work to ensure
their survival. It is significant that UNESCO has proposed using the Internet to do the
job (this, of course, poses a huge challenge for the poorest countries, many of whose
languages are purely oral and have no alphabet).
In such a research field, it seems therefore significant to consider specifically the
multiplication of online cultural portals which appear in many countries every day.
Let us first consider the ecology of cultural portals.
Ecology of cultural portals
Ecology of the media and hyperhumanism
We see all kinds of cultural portals and we may consider all of them as a challenge in
the profusion of websites, information and diverse media growing around us in this
information society which runs us today. In the following classification, we shall try
to consider them from the point of view of their objectives.
Media ecology is a human science dedicated to the study of media environments.
The Media Ecology Association has proposed the following definition: “The study of
media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information
and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs” 5 . It seems to me
also that the history and the social and political context of development of those
media, the users they tend to reach and the sociological analysis of their contents are
very relevant to explain their nature, their success or limits, and their evolution.
Media ecology was developed by Neil Postman in a Program of Media at New York
University in 1971. Marshall McLuhan is frequently quoted for having formulated
the basic idea inspiring ecology of media:
“[It] means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel
each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for
example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television
might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some
3 http://crisscrossed.net/2007/12/17/not-english-but-a-multilingual-social-web-is-the-keyfor-collaboration/
4 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001421/142186e.pdf
5 http://www.media-ecology.org/mecology/
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