For all of us in cyberspace, the controversy over wrapping the Reichstag in aluminized cloth raises powerful questions concerning the creation and evolution of virtual sites. [See 211th session of German Parliament, Feb 25, 1994, for full text of debate, in English.]
Perhaps the Wrapped Reichstag will serve to make us all aware of the ephemeral nature of our virtual world. For now, the quality that distinguishes the World Wide Web is simply the tremendous rate of change as tens of thousands of sites are under almost continuous construction day and night. As in most cities undergoing a massive construction boom, no one is asking about preserving historical sites of interest. For example, I would find it very interesting to be able to travel back in time and look at Yahoo's site as it existed in its first two months, complete with working links to sites as they existed at that point in time. A virtual version of Williamsburg may be an important tourist attraction in another ten years, but it may already be too late. Or is it? Perhaps enough backups still exist today to recreate the WWW in its first few weeks of existence. But unless we act immediately, it will assuredly be too late and a very important part of our history in cyberspace will be lost.
The deeper questions raised by the "Wrapped Reichstag", how space acquires symbolic importance, how symbols change over time, and the power of art to examine (and perhaps alter) symbols, are all questions that the pioneers of cyberspace have been too busy to ask, but are questions that will have to be answered if cyberspace is to become a real community with shared symbols representing shared values. The struggle to define those values has been joined and The Tangled Web will do its best to keep you informed. If you have written an article on how to create a sense of community on the Internet, publish it on our site. Click here to submit it to the editor.