[Air-l] Internet as a database?

Denise N. Rall denrall at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 12 14:41:05 PST 2003


Dear Aoir's -

I have recently heard some conversation among the New
Media crowd regarding the internet as a database
rather than as a CMC, or communicative medium.

I know some properties of databases, storage,
indexing, retrieval and so on. Of course the phone
book is a database, databases are not
medium-dependent, although usually today they are
conceived of as digital rather than text-based.

I am interested to know any authors who are putting
this view forward, and how the database model gains
anything conceptually over CMC. I have stayed with 
CMC as a conceptual model because it allows for
transport. I don't yet see in a database model where
the transport segment lies.  Someone said, distributed
database but that, to my mind, only implies a variety
of databases connected by some indexing scheme, and
packets are distributed in quite another way.

I think we might keep this discussion on list if
others find this provocative as it may prove very
enlightening.

Cheers, Denise



=====
"it's easier to use your mouse than your brain"
Denise Rall, Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator &
PhD student, School of Education, Southern Cross University,
PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW, 2480 Australia
Phone +61-2-6624-8627 Fax +61-2-6624-8637
Office (Tuesdays) (02) 6620 3577 Mob 0438 233 344
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/edu/research/deniserall/index.html

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