The internet? Bah, it's a fad

[Teelie]

Well that was 15 years ago. What a barren wasteland of nothing this turned out to be.

The irony of this is virtually everything he said it lacked, is now a regular and essential part of every day life for virtually anyone who uses the internet. Not to mention the article is itself written online.

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

 

[RoJoHen]

That's pretty funny. I especially liked the part about online shopping and the "extensive training" for teachers to use computers in the classroom. Sure, in 1995 the internet sucked, but it's obviously made incredible improvements. I'd like to see what this guy is up to now and how he uses the internet in his daily life.

 

[sojourner]

I was thinking of the exact topic the other day while riding my horse and buggy to the local port to catch a fast ship to europe!

 

[Owain Taggart]

Wow, I can see some of the points it makes, but at the same time, it seems to be taking the wrong angle. Computers in the classroom for example have never been about taking the place of the teacher, but to be a tool to use in the classroom. Nowadays, professors recommend the use of laptops to use for note-taking. Computers as a learning accessory, not a teacher replacement.

As for the business aspect, I don't think Amazon exited yet. Which year did it open? 2000? Amazon pretty much lead the way, and the only reason why local malls did more business was that the infrastructure needed for doing internet business was still in its infancy. These days, some businesses don't even have a brick and mortar store anymore, making the decision to only deal via the internet. But he's right about one thing. The local mall won't be going away anytime soon. For the most part, the internet acts as a suppliment to a business.

Slightly off-topic, but our downtown isn't doing so well. It's actually pretty embarrassing as there are so many empty storefronts. One street's almost completely bare of anything interesting.

 

[scotpens]

. . . Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.

He said that like it's a bad thing.

And they said the automobile would never replace the horse.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I just knew after reading the first sentence it was Cliff Stoll. He's a smart guy but he was so far off the mark with regard to the mainstream potential of the Internet. The KGB, the Computer, and Me is still one of my all-time favorite NOVA episodes.

 

[Brent]

And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

LAWLZ

 

[Owain Taggart]

And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

LAWLZ

Wonder what he'd think of the Kindle or the iPad. Hey, guess what. You can tote around your whole bookshelf to the beach!

 

[Brent]

And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

LAWLZ

Wonder what he'd think of the Kindle or the iPad. Hey, guess what. You can tote around your whole bookshelf to the beach!

Yep, and laptops have certainly come a long way and are very portable to take to the beach, either a regular sized laptop, or a netbook.

Shoot, people are reading books and stuff on their cell phones now, which is even more portable to take to the beach. There is an Amazon/Kindle app for cell phones.

 

[Teelie]

Forget your bookshelf, you can have an entire library with you provided there's wifi.

There are many things people predicted in the past about the future that seem so ridiculous to us now. I ran across this link in an email about that subject and it linked back to this article which given today's internet just sounds like another Prince proclamation of the internet being over. Only it was 15 years ago.

 

[Miss Chicken]

How wrong can one person be?

Lets see -

I rarely buy a newspaper. I read my local newspaper online, as well as some other online newspapers.

I order and pay for most of my groceries online.

90% of my books are bought online.

I have order airline tickets though the internet.

I did some of my library course through online classes.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

What's really ironic is that this guy had been on the Internet longer than pretty much all of us, and he couldn't see the potential that was staring him in the face.

 

[TheGodBen]

What's really ironic is that this guy had been on the Internet longer than pretty much all of us, and he couldn't see the potential that was staring him in the face.

In a way that's funny, but in another way it makes sense. I mean, when I first started hearing all the hype about the internet and how it would change all our lives, I assumed it was a fad that would go away in a few years, but I had never been on the internet at that time. I had no idea how to use a web browser, let alone send an email. As someone that claims to have used the internet for decades, you'd imagine he'd have been in a better position to understand than the young me.

At the same time, he did know the internet, and he knew just how limited it was back then, and like so many people that are experts on a subject, he failed to stick his head up and look at what might be because he was so consumed by what it is now. His comment about searching the internet exemplifies this; he failed to understand that people were working on making internet searches better, and even worse, he failed to see that internet searches could be an industry worth billions of dollars.

Gods, the 90s really was a dark time.

 

[Amaris]

Wow, I can see some of the points it makes, but at the same time, it seems to be taking the wrong angle. Computers in the classroom for example have never been about taking the place of the teacher, but to be a tool to use in the classroom. Nowadays, professors recommend the use of laptops to use for note-taking. Computers as a learning accessory, not a teacher replacement.

As for the business aspect, I don't think Amazon exited yet. Which year did it open? 2000? Amazon pretty much lead the way, and the only reason why local malls did more business was that the infrastructure needed for doing internet business was still in its infancy. These days, some businesses don't even have a brick and mortar store anymore, making the decision to only deal via the internet. But he's right about one thing. The local mall won't be going away anytime soon. For the most part, the internet acts as a suppliment to a business.

Slightly off-topic, but our downtown isn't doing so well. It's actually pretty embarrassing as there are so many empty storefronts. One street's almost completely bare of anything interesting.

Amazon was founded in 1994, a year before this article. It started selling in 1995, and according to Wiki, became profitable by 2001, so yeah, he was way, way off the mark.

 

[Teelie]

My family actually got our first computer not too long after he published that article. It was the dial up days and even pulling up an image like the above took time.

Of course back then no one knew or expected people would download high definition movies online in real time streaming like you can now on something like Netflix. The quality isn't the greatest but it's still an amazing leap from a tiny graphic to a full-sized movie and in the time it takes to watch it no less.

But I'd say even back then I knew the internet would be far bigger than it was at that time. Maybe it was his previous years of internet experience that jaded him to the possiblity but even now, 15 years for me online I can see the internet going much further than this. I wouldn't even begin to speculate on where just that it will.

That said, I still have my doubts it will replace physical media entirely any time soon. I love streaming video and the ease of access to almost anything I want but nothing beats having a copy you can pop in a DVD/Blu-Ray player or a book you can read with no power or just without internet for some reason.

Who knows? In 15 years I might be as wrong as him and no one will use physical media for anything but legal or back-up purposes.

 

[propita]

We got our first laptop in 1996, for Hubby's schooling. It was great for typing reports and such, but we took a while to go online (and then it was dial-up, but that's what there was). For research, we still had to go to the library--fortunately, we could hit the Caltech library back then. But nothing online that we were aware of, or if there was, it just took too long.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Forget your bookshelf, you can have an entire library with you provided there's wifi.

There are many things people predicted in the past about the future that seem so ridiculous to us now. I ran across this link in an email about that subject and it linked back to this article which given today's internet just sounds like another Prince proclamation of the internet being over. Only it was 15 years ago.

Bookshelf. Library. Same thing. That's what I was getting at with my comment

Anyways, as for the comments, very true. It's funny looking back. It's hard to believe that 15 years ago, or even as much as 2 years ago, we didn't have iPads or Kindles. Kids actually played outside 15 years ago .

Then again, the biggest difference that could have affected his opinion is that everyone back then was on dialup. High-speed on fiber-optics? No way! So, that must have coloured his perception. Of course if it had stayed dialup, he'd probably be right, and we wouldn't be here with high speed connections and streaming movies from services like Netflix. That would probably just blow his 1994 mind. I think that he actually published a followup article several years ago pointing out how wrong he was.

What Ben says about searching is true. I remember how hard it was searching for a topic to help me with school work, and I remember being frustrated by it. It was a two part problem. The resources weren't there and the search engines back then were painfully inadequate. It often seemed that, whichever search engine you used, either Yahoo, Webcrawler, Excite, etc, would more or less all return the same results. Branding was more or less due to loyalty, and not due to who gave you the best results. Then Google came along and changed everything. It seemed to dig deeper and get better results.

But yeah, I'm like you. I was fully into the internet in 94, crawling the Java chat rooms on Earthweb, dealing with constant disconnects. I knew my way around. There are times where I'll just feel jaded and bored. And I'm still keeping my DVDs. Heck, I still buy physical CDs. I like knowing I got what I paid for and that I'll still be able to access it years down the road.

Speaking of Kindles, I'm getting one in February.

Oh, and thanks for looking that up, Sarek. I guess I wasn't too far off the mark on that one. If he'd waited a year before writing that article, maybe he'd have different thoughts about internet commerce. And I refuse to call it e-commerce. That sounds too much like a 90's term used before the internet bust. "Internet commerce" sounds more legit.

 

[scotpens]

I just knew after reading the first sentence it was Cliff Stoll.

Yeah, now I remember the guy. He was a computer Luddite. I wonder how much his views on computers and the internet have changed in 15 years.

 

[Miss Chicken]

His entry at Wikipedia does state

Stoll sells blown glass Klein bottles on the Web

 

[TheGodBen]

Then again, the biggest difference that could have affected his opinion is that everyone back then was on dialup.

The speed of the internet was one of the issues, but all of the technology of the time wasn't up to the task of the modern internet. Just think about storage; back in 95 most of us were using harddrives measured in hundreds of megabytes, maybe gigabytes, while now we've moved into the terrabyte era. The idea that we could store everything digitally was a big enough feat back then, the problem with transmitting it to millions of people was another concern.

Last year, I read that 20 hours of video was being uploaded to YouTube every minute, so every minute, 1,200 minutes of footage is being added to their servers. And that rate increases with time, they could be over 30 hours per minute by now. That's mind-boggling to think about now, let alone 15 years ago. And that's only one website (albeit, one of the biggest).