After fashion and the media's biggest initial 
interest in the Internet, due to the development 
of the WWW and the U.S. government's political 
initiative to build up and expand the national 
information infrastructure ("info highway") had 
ebbed away, more and more voices can recently be 
heard criticizing some people's euphoric over-
enthusiasiasm over the "global village" and 
questioning the existence of a Net community. 
Clifford Stoll describes his "increasingly 
contradictory feelings" towards the "trendy 
community" of the "Internet desert" (Clifford 
Stoll). "The illusion of the global community 
in cyberspace is gradually being replaced by a 
more realistic view of the screen", SPIEGEL 
magazine states (Nr. 14, 1996, p. 100). In an 
interview with the Berlin newspaper Der Tages-
spiegel, Joseph Weizenbaum talked about how human 
encounters were being replaced by pseudo encounters.