tional cyberspace of information that will
support me (sometimes) and restrict me (other times) and delight me (I hope
often) and frustrate me (I am sure).

= And your definition of the information society?

An information society is one in which people in general are aware of the
importance of information as a commodity, and attach a price to it as a matter
of course. Throughout history, some people have always understood how important
information is, for their own benefit. But when the majority of society starts
working with and on information per se, then the society can be called an
information society. This may sound a bit vacuous or circularly defined, but I
bet you that anthropologists can go and count what percentage of society was
dedicated to information processing as a commodity in each society. Where they
initially will find only teachers, rulers' councillors, and sages, they will in
later societies find people like librarians, retired domain experts
(consultants), and so on. The jumps in communication of information from oral to
written to printed to electronic every time widened (in time and space)
information dissemination, thereby making it less and less necessary to re-learn
and re-do certain difficult things. In an ultimate information society, I
suppose, you would state your goal and then the information agencies (both the
cyberspace agents and the human experts) would conspire to bring you the means
to achieve it, or to achieve it for you, minimizing the amount of work you'd
have to do to only that is truly new or truly needs to be re-done with the
material at hand.

CHRISTIANE JADELOT (Nancy, France)

#Researcher at the INALF (Institut national de la langue francaise - National
Institute of the French Language)

The purpose of the INaLF -- part of the France's National Centre for Scientific
Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) -- is to design
research programmes on the French language, particularly its vocabulary. The
INaLF's constantly expanding and revised data, processed by special computer
systems, deal with all aspects of the French language: literary discourse
(14th-20th centuries), everyday language (written and spoken), scientific and
technical language (terminologies), and regional languages. This data, which is
an very important study resource, is made available to people interested in the
French language (teachers and researchers, business people, the servic