Rudenstine Addresses Conference

Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine greeted the Conference on the Internet and Society with a consonant, a vowel, and the promise that they would leave Friday with some new ideas about how the Net is evolving.

"Revolution isn't a word we should use lightly," he told the audience in Sanders Theatre. "But what has brought us all here, I suspect, is a strong sense that we are on the verge of something which has a profound potential to transform many aspects of the way we live, the way we work, and the way we learn."

A few years ago, he said, the Internet was virtually unknown. "Now, it seems to have spread from almost nowhere to almost everywhere in the blink of an eye.

" 'W' -- as in 'WWW' -- seems suddenly to have become the most commonly encountered consonant in the English language. 'E' -- as in e-mail, e-prints, e-journals, e-groups, and e-lectronic everything else -- seems to have emerged as our all-purpose, ever-present vowel."

He predicted that information, communications, and technology will change in ways that are constantly surprising and thus the conference will have to be satisfied with ideas that are "tentative, provisional, conditional, qualified, and subject to constant revision."

"We will inevitably, leave this conference with more questions than we had at the start. They will, I hope, be more sophisticated and deeper questions, informed by the conversations that take place over the next few days. It is, after all, the very fluidity and complexity of the situation before us that promise to make this gathering worthwhile."