Net worth
Sir: Your leader on the Internet (11 Octo- ber) was uncharacteristically ill-informed and curmudgeonly. That many people use it to find pornographic images is no more an argument against the Net than chat-line services are against the telephone. That Mr Blair talks about it a great deal is again not an argument against it. One might have expected more penetrating observations on his flirtation with Bill Gates of Microsoft to connect British schools to the Net, which had the same dangers as his pre-election chats to British Telecom: both were the bad Old Labour idea of talking to a monopoly supplier first, instead of finding out who could best do what is wanted.
As to the Net itself, I suspect you know nothing about it if you imagine it is merely for 'surfing', or randomly drifting about retrieving unwanted information. Just imagine that, in any area of research, one can now go straight to the 'personal web pages' of colleagues anywhere in the world, look at the state of their work and instantly retrieve any papers they have made avail- able. That benefit is incalculable for aca- demics and businesses, even if sometimes one also has to pass by photographs of their families and be told how they like to spend their weekends.
Yorick Wilks
111 Osborne Road, Sheffield
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