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 __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com