Ferenc Gerlóczy
.hu: Hungary on the Net
Not long ago, a brilliant future was predicted for the Internet in Hungary. It had just started with a promisingly big bang. However, a "White Book", published last spring (with black covers), observes in a mournful tone that the spectacular progress of the Internet in Hungary was halted two years ago. It blames high telephone rates and the similarly high providers' charges. The pamphlet, Internet in the Homes. Hungary Falling Behind. The Situation and Suggestions (http://www.internetto. hu/friss/ feherkonyv) points out that the costs of Internet use in Hungary are high not only by American, but even by European standards. The report, compiled by the editors-in-chief of Hungary's most visited website, the webzine Internetto and the online version of the country's leading economic and political weekly, HVG Online, begins with the shocking news that while "in Western Europe, 4 per cent of all households are connected to the Net, the same figure in Hungary is no higher than 0.7 per cent."
As evidence that the cause of this dramatic difference is really the high telephone rates, the authors mention that in February, when—in fact at the urging of the authors of this very report—a late-night reduction was introduced by the national telephone service, especially aimed at Internet users, traffic not only doubled in the Hungarian corner of the Net but, as the correspondent of the leading Hungarian daily, Népszabadság wrote, "nighttime traffic jams were created on the Infobahn". Still, cheap late-night websurfing, the same correspondent wrote, "can only be a temporary solution in the absence of something better, especially for children: if you surf at night, you are likely to fall asleep in class next morning."
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There are Hungarian search engines, digital libraries, intelligent cities and even villages, virtual university and long-distance work—whereas we do not even have an answer to the question as to what "Hungarian web" means. It may be regarded as the equivalent to all e-mail and web addresses ending in "hu". That, on the other hand, would mean omitting the URLs ending in "com", i.e., the commercial ones. Moreover, "Hungarian web" cannot be regarded as equivalent to Internet in the Hungarian language since most web pages all over the country (or more exactly, all over "hu") have English versions as well, and it is often the English version that is first found by browsers too. Up to the start of the last election campaign, the home page of the liberal party, the League of Free Democrats, which had provided the telecommunications minister of the last government, first welcomed those clicking their way there in English, and only from there offered a link to those who would rather choose to browse on in their native language. According to observers, that attitude may have contributed to the party's humiliating defeat in the elections. It may be added that neither do websites in the Hungarian language necessarily mean websites physically located in Hungary, i.e. they may be actually registered anywhere from the USA to Romania, Slovakia or the Cayman Islands.
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"There are many projects in the world aimed at collecting and publishing electronic texts," István Moldován, one of MEK's founders says, "but I know of none which has accomplished this on a similar nation-wide plane as we do." Moldován claims that this ensures the national character of the Hungarian digital library which keeps growing day by day. For the time being, the stock is collected on a voluntary basis partly from material originally published in print—like the majority of classical literary texts—and partly from works produced originally by a digital process. It follows from this that MEK collects mainly works for which no royalty is likely to be asked, although the managers of the library champion the principle of what is called "fair use". The texts uploaded by them on the web bear a headline which proclaims that the material may be freely copied for educational, journalistic or cultural purposes but their multiplication for commercial use is prohibited. In Hungary the old adage that "a nation lives in its language" is still considered valid, and the tradition that the number of poets per population is one of the highest in the world is also very much alive. The number of the "nation's great poets" in Hungary is not three or four as in other countries but rather thirty or forty. They are now also present on the web (in MEK, too).
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The browser hitting upon the Hungarian web is no longer lost if he or she wants a Yahoo-type nation-wide directory. Such a directory, HUDIR, is now available at http://www.net.hu/hudir/ (or its Ame-
rican mirror site, http://www.hungary. com/hudir). For those preferring word searches, there is the Hungarian version of the search engine AltaVista, launched a few months ago under the
name "Altavizsla", at http://www.altavizsla.matav.hu/, which has since become the most popular Hungarian website. (The name, by the way, is a pun. A vizsla is a dog, a Hungarian
retriever.) The site, in contrast to the searches narrowed down to Hungarian of the original Altavista of Digital, performs searches through the pages under "hu" in general—including
those in English—rather than covering web pages "in the Hungarian language".
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At least that is the view held by Kristóf Nyiri, the President of the Society of Hungarian Philosophers, an Internet enthusiast. "My dream," the philosopher says, "is the Hungarian-speaking youth living in a small village without any knowledge of English, who acquires knowledge, language skills and an American graduate degree within a few years, then finds employment easily, perhaps even abroad, without ever having left the area where he lives." The conditions whereby the dream may come true are gradually coming about. Uniworld University is already organizing classes but, more importantly, teaching English over the Internet for the remote regions of Hungary has already begun. Within the framework of a course organized by the remote teaching university Uniworld, teachers of the English and American Institute of Budapest University are giving English classes to inhabitants of a small village which is barely on the map: there is a single road leading there, and no railway.
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These computerized, community-building "telehouses" display a kind of similarity with the "people's colleges" associated with the movement of Populist or, rather, rural writers and village researchers in Hungary before and directly after the Second World War. The idea that there should be an institution providing education to rural people, especially in wintertime, the slack period for those who live on the the land, comes from Scandinavia, just like the idea of the telehouse. The movement also demonstrates that financing concrete projects is far more effective than investments funded in an equalizing manner from central coffers.
Apart from this, Hungarian Internet developers are increasingly watching Scandinavia these days. The good English spoken by virtually everyone there is as widely appreciated as is their (Scandinavian) cultural autonomy, precisely in relation to the English-speaking Web. It is, in any case, remarkable that according to statistics, the number of computers connected to the Internet is higher in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Denmark than in English-speaking Britain, the United States or Australia.
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Ferenc Gerlóczy,
is on the staff of Heti Világgazdaság, an economic weekly.
