The close identification of Jean d'Ormesson with the CIPSH, of which he was Secretary-General, is legendary. CIPSH, a UNESCO-affiliated non-governmental organization, is seen as emblematic of the post-Second World War era when the humanities came together in 1949 to trade critical responses in a single forum. Jean d'Ormesson's relationship with UNESCO helped demonstrate the significance of this international network and consolidate the role of Diogenes as a voice close to UNESCO's own, sharing the same goals.

Complexity of interpretation of the archaeological evidence about early human migrations here concerns both the exclusively African origin of the earliest ancestors of the species Homo, and the African or polycentric genesis of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH). Through the medium of tool production remains - blade technologies in particular - Kozlowski traces the chronology of early extra-African migrations to re-examine their causes, including environmental change. Technological innovations prove to be a means by which the population movements of North Africa and Southern Europe can be tracked: from the archaic Homo sapiens to AMH (600,000 to 200/150,000 years BP); and the subsequent spread of AMH (50,000 to 30,000 BP).

Telematic technologies, so-called, will impinge increasingly on personal and professional lives in the decades to come. Digitized data are already transforming international communication and the way we live our everyday lives. Sharper conceptual instruments are needed to help us analyse how to deal with these changes, as technological evolution outpaces the cultural, and the nature of the questions to be resolved is semantic rather than technical. The Turing and the Chinese room tests are invoked to help examine how man and computer can work together. But however well provided we are with syntactic and semantic knowledge, it is the absence of a developed pragmatics that stands in the way of truly intelligent computers and search engines that can do more than match symbols - i.e. identify matching content via genuinely pluridisciplinary linkages.

Recent growth in international scholarly exchange owes much to a major revolution in the technical, principally electronic, means of communicating. These are reinforced by new institutional frameworks created to foster international scientific communication and cooperation. The author, looking back at earlier ways of exchanging information, examines the Minutes of the Philosophical Society of Finland from 1873 to 1925, and is impressed by the personalities involved and the issues debated. Particularly in a time of technology, it is worthwhile to be reminded of the importance of relationships and personal contacts to maintaining the quality of academic debate.

Human knowledge would benefit greatly if images of all works of art in the public domain - i.e. those for which the creator's copyright has expired - were readily available on the web. Scholars pay a high price in reproduction fees to illustrate their articles, while institutions profit from the exposure their collections and archives are given in the pages of scholarly publications. Legal and commercial forces of regulation and licensing are attempting to extend their control over copyright at a time when digital technology makes the dissemination, downloading and reproducing of electronically generated and scanned images easier than it has ever been. Some collections of photographic images of works of art are charging high fees in situations where their right to claim ‘ownership’ is contentious. The author argues, with reference to the work of Robert Baron, that because digitization has made control of intellectual property a for-profit business, the net result could be an undermining of public domain. Subscription deals with non-profit institutions could be a fairer way forward, and ARTstor is cited as a positive example.

Freedom of communication is threatened by globalization. In rich countries ease of access is offset by ownership of the means of communication and corporate efficiency imperatives which are stifling human and intellectual diversity. Poorer countries have restricted or no access to knowledge and culture via electronic media. As technical progress offers better means to communicate ideas, the opportunities to do so are being restricted. The author uses a Question and Answer approach to debate how to exchange information in the ‘knowledge society’. He raises issues of access control, dissemination and making best use of the localized means of communication to which one does have access, with specific reference to ‘Interlignes’ and its proposed charter.

The internet has revolutionized religious growth and dissemination. It is multifunctional in this respect, and multi-disciplinarity is required in order to comprehend and benefit from its technological advances. It is still hard to discern whether the internet is predominantly utopian or dystopian in its effects, and a helpful conceptual distinction is that between ‘religion online’ and ‘online religion’; also ‘offline’ religion - the impact internet religion has on more conventional forms of practice and expression. As a new interface for mediating religious belief, ritual and ethical practice, and for constituting community and selfhood, the internet subverts and recasts not only these categories, but others such as ‘world religion’ and ‘minority religious group’. You don't have to be a large operation now to have a global reach - a democratization of religion is in progress.

The language of the ethnographer gets ‘stretched’ in an effort to wrap it around the world created by another language. Academic jargon can only disguise this linguistic disorder; hypertext can serve as a kind of therapy, an escape from assertive, monological statements about the other - ‘hard’ hypertextuality, that is. The author explores hypertextuality through the multiplicity of narrative programs that transect an electronic book with five co-authors, through which the reader can navigate as yet another co-author, or bricoleur. The topology of the cadavre exquis offers the image of a foreign culture with which we can establish multiple points of contact.

The reality of the internet raises questions about our experience of the world. In the name of positivist science the colonial enterprise constructed a whole hierarchy of civilizations, putting Africa at the bottom of the scale - an issue of power. African society's relationship to the internet should be viewed within the general context of the encounter between Africa and techno-scientific rationality. The internet raises large questions about African received experience and lived experience, and the African conception of time. The internet's instantaneous time challenges the cyclical and linear nature of time in African cultures. Also, the its virtual space has little meaning in the African context of the generally two-dimensional - the visible and invisible.