Spheres, cylinders, right angles: here were forms that water and weather couldn’t do. As a poet said: “I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree,” but you don’t want to put yourself out of business completely. It was left to a later generation, Richard Long and other raw nature workers, to realise that that could be good artistic business, too.Carving Mountains , Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge until april 26 Admission free Then at De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea May 2 to June 28.. According to the latest American Internet User Survey, conducted by the Emerging Technology Research Group (ETRG, http:// www.cyberdialogue /frame.html), nearly 16 million people in the US have used the Internet within the past 12 months but haven’t used it since. This is a shockingly high number, considering how much investment goes into the technical infrastructure that allows people to get connected.

There is a general assumption in the Internet community that the only thing that stops people from using the Internet en masse is the cost of hardware and software difficulties. If only computers were cheaper and easier to use, then everyone would take the plunge into cyberspace. This thinking is supported by ICL research, which found that more than 68 per cent of high-street shoppers would appreciate home shopping facilities. But the ETRG survey indicates that our assumptions may be wrong, and more work must be done to take the Internet to the mass market.
My own theory, stemming from years of looking at frustrated users in Cyberia cafes around the world, is that it is still all but impossible to find what you are looking for on the Net. All of the search engines and directories so far have collectively failed to provide a simple service that would actually help me to find my favourite shop or online service.

Watching with me and sharing the frustrations of cybersurfers has been Keith Teare, co-founder of Cyberia and my business partner for many years. He eventually decided to do something about the poor “findability” of Websites and moved to Silicon Valley, founding Centraal, a company that provides a simplified directory service via a special plug-in (see related article on page eight).However, making the Internet easier to use is only half of the solution. A clue to the second obstacle to mass uptake can be found in a Business Week survey that shows that 65 per cent of respondents did not use the Net because they felt that their personal information would not be secure. The survey also found that 61 per cent of people who are not currently online said that government protection of personal information would encourage them to explore the Net further. Only nine per cent of Internet users would trust a Website’s posted policy statement on data protection. These are damning statistics, indicating that building consumer trust in the Web is going to need government legislation.More than 53 per cent of those surveyed by Business Week thought that government should pass laws regulating how personal information can be collected and used on the Net.