Thinking about the ``new media'' all too often disregards the actual details of its subject matter, drawing the big picture and leaving out all the messy - but potentially fascinating - details. Writing about electronic networking within the framework of an Austro-Hungarian project I had therefore decided to do some empirical research before embarking on philosophical reflections. (Content on the Net changes rapidly. Some of the sites described in the following paragraphs will, therefore, have been changed when this essay is printed.) I had found the ``Hungarian Homepage'' (``http://www.fsz.bme.hu/hungary/homepage.html'') and made a bookmark for further use. Then, one weekend, I sat down to explore the electronic space opened up by this nicely designed ``sensitive map'' which enabled me to pick the relevant towns or districts from a multi-coloured geographical representation of the state of Hungary. Connections failed Saturday, connections failed Sunday as well. Checking the electronic routing showed that my demands got stuck at some server at the Technical University of Budapest, which hosts the Homepage I was looking for. The following result of ``traceroute'' is not shown in order to impress the reader with a wealth of numbers, but rather to throw some light onto the commonly hidden causes of failing internet requests.
Such failures are by no means uncommon. Experienced surfers develop special skills to circumvent those kind of blockages. So I turned to the list of WWW-Servers maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium at
``http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html'',
intending to pick out some interesting Hungarian Sites. At this address, however, one is offered a huge list (1.6 MByte) which is much too big for ordinary use over a telephone line. Realizing this, I turned to the summary, which offers only top-level nodes for each country. Alas, this proved of little help, since those very nodes were unreachable. After the alphabet and geography had failed as means of orientation I tried the ``Subjects'' listing, also provided by the Web Consortium. ``The WWW Virtual Library'' contains a pointer to ``Russian and East European Studies'', a service offered at the University of Pittsburgh. ``The REESWeb is a comprehensive index of electronic resources on the Balkans, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Central Europe, the CIS, Eastern Europe, the NIS, the Russian Federation, and the former Soviet Union.'' It did, of course, point to the location I knew to be out of service. But it contained another extremely valuable piece of information. There seemed to be a ``Hungary.Network'' that had up to now escaped my attention.
Connecting to ``http://www.hungary.com/'' proved to be no problem at all. This site suited my purposes even better than the one I had actually tried to reach. Rather than presenting me with the Hungarian map and inviting me to check on what servers in Miskolc, Pecs and Szeged had to offer, it showed a very businesslike structure, facilitating quick references to suitable topics:
Following this list there were more extensively documented headings: ``Government, Diplomacy and Politics'', ,,Internet Media``, ``Travel and Entertainment'', ,,Business Corner`` and - last and probably least - ``Society, Science and Culture'', featuring among other things a reference to ``Hungarian Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St. John (Johannitter), Inc.'' and the ``American Transsylvanian Federation''. I had hit on a really professional undertaking and checked its location, since the ``.com-suffix'' did not give any clue as to the whereabouts of the address.
As it turned out I was looking at a page served by a machine in New York. The ``Hungarian Electronic Resources FAQ'' maintained by Zoli Fekete mentions ``A new directory server ,http://www.hungary.com/hudir/''` that ``catalogizes hierarchically the growing number of Hungarian Internet info sources.''. The last available revision of the FAQ dates from 24 June 1995. Meanwhile the ``Hungary.Network'' has developed into a comprehensive source outperforming the local Hungarian sites. Browsing through the information offered there I was led to various interesting agencies, including the ``Central Europe Online Navigator'' (at ,,http://www.ceo.cz/``) which referred me to ``Central Europe Today On-Line'', where I could read about the latest corruption scandal reported in the ``Budapest Sun''. And I hit on the somewhat confusing homepage of a ``Osteuropa Informations-Verein'' which announced a link to ``http://web.de/``: ``Deutschland im Internet'' with the following cryptic remark: ``Deutschsprachige Webseiten wäare (sic!) zwar netter (oder sprechen die Oesterreicher kein Deutsch), dennoch eines der besten Suchsysteme in deutscher Sprache.''
This indirect call for increased Austrian activity on the Net left me somewhat perplexed and prompted closer inspection of the sources of the page I had hit upon. As it turned out I was reading an entry of Glasnet, a prominent Moscow service. It informed me of its most recent advances: ``We are glad to share our newest joy with you; our direct link to the US is up, it is a nice addition to our links via Sprint and Demos. In the US, Internet connectivity for our link is provided by ``http://www.crl.com/''. The ,,Informations-Verein`` is - I guess - an initiative of ethnic Germans in Russia. Its link to ``Deutschland im Internet'', on the other hand, led me to a server in Karlsruhe. ``Web.de läuft auf einer Silicon Graphics Web Force Indy mit einem Netscape Communications Server und ist ein Service der Cinetic Medientechnik.'' I was rapidly getting lost criss-crossing the Atlantic and being referred from scholarly pages to more or less blatant advertisements and vice versa. The initial intention had been to investigate the Austro-Hungarian relationship seen from within the Internet. After 30 minutes of browsing I had not connected to a single Hungarian Web-site. Yet, I had collected enough material to think about.