I was talking to a friend recently about my fascination with comics, specifically Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and she interrupted me to correct me. "Not comics," she said. "Graphic novels." It was all I could do to keep from foaming at the mouth. I then patiently explained to her the excellent marketing gimmick that is the 'graphic novel', and how it was originally used to describe comic-book adaptations of short stories and novellas, and how Will Eisner co-opted the term to market his A Contract With God, and Other Tenement Stories to adults, instead of the children who traditionally read comic books. I then directed her to a YouTube video of Neil Gaiman explaining how he wrote comics, and couldn't, for the world of him, understand what a 'graphic novel' was.
The Lines Are Open
The usual collection of digital communication channels, a veritable arsenal, if you will. Choose your weapon, and we'll meet on the lawns at dawn (or something):
- If the Internet is an international entity, then it should be administered by an equally international body. The Obama administration's move to accept this truth is a marked deviation from the Bush era, and a move in the right direction.
- It is important to note that this move can create serious issues of both internationalization and localization of the Internet, particularly from the perspectives of scale and security. Many of these issues have already been raised by ICANN, but moving forward, a global perspective will certainly help to ensure that they will be addressed.
- It is not in anybody's interest to make the Internet an auction site for top level domains, and the rest of the world is perfectly capable of ensuring that frivolous domains are not turned into a money-making machine for ICANN and domain registrars. In other words, don't expect .sport or .cola to come into existence anytime soon.
- Unicode URLs are the route to making the Internet truly global, but aforementioned security issues need to be addressed and loopholes preempted. Once again, it's a grown-up world, and they can handle the pressure.
- Finally, the Internet gets to be truly international in almost all aspects. This means the European and Asian representatives on ICANN's Governmental Advisory Council now have to show that they can step up and shoulder the burden of shaping the Internet's future.
