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Attitudes toward Technology and Communication 157

Figure 5
Number of Communes (with more than 5,000 Inhabitants)
with and without Internet Sites: Absolute Figures

For this study, I examined whether each commune of over five
thousand inhabitants had an Internet site. My approach was to type
in the name of the commune as a domain. When the Internet an-
nounced that the corresponding “host” could not be found, I checked
via a search engine (Alta Vista) to make sure.
The results of my research are shown in Figure 4. The first
thing that strikes us is that the majority of the communes with
over 5,000 inhabitants are found around the large urban areas,
most of which are in the middle of the country. The larger agricul-
tural regions in the foothills of the Alps, the Alps and the Jura
mountains, as well as the agrarian hinterlands of the Canton of
Vaud remain white.
If we concentrate on the relationship between the light and
dark grey areas, it is clear that in the French-speaking area, the
dark grey areas (i.e., communes with homepages) predominate; by
contrast, there is a greater proportion of light grey (i.e., communes
without homepages) in the German-speaking area. The canton of
Geneva is a special case: this canton has obviously coordinated the
Internet sites of the various communes, so even the smaller com-
munes in the canton have their own Internet site, and all with a
uniform style. Basel’s site is also different, since its homepage is
specifically stated as a cantonal one: it cannot be found under the
name of the city, Basel, but under the cantonal abbreviations of
BS or BL. Basel-city was indeed the first Swiss canton with a
homepage, which was created in December 1994 (Poupa et al.
1997, 16). Finally, Ticino is especially underrepresented, since only