In 1995 Netscape was on the rise having created the first commercially viable Web browser. For the first time regular people could use the Internet. They didn’t know why they wanted to use it, but they could.
That browser combined with the earlier acquiescence of the technocrats from the National Science Foundation who managed the Internet backbone and the technonerds who were it’s primary users to commercial communications made it possible for the Internet to take the path that it has.
That same year, Clifford Stoll, astronomer and computer expert, took on the job of disabusing everyone of any ideas about how the Internet might change our lives.
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 obsolete. 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.
Clifford Stoll: Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com
I guess it wasn’t really his fault that he wasn’t a visionary of what could be at the time. When a paradigm shift as big as this comes it’s easy to miss it at the front edge.
Were the people who lived during the Renaissance aware of the importance of the time they lived in? Absolutely. But it took them more than a century to figure it out.
When this all started, almost none of us thought about what the Internet could be. Only the most visionary of thinkers like Nicolas Negroponte had some idea of what might be happening.
Over a decade later the Internet has invaded just about every corner of our lives and some people are beginning to look with a much less jaundiced eye at what could be. Although the ideas might seem a bit wild, they don’t seem as wild as they might have 15 years ago.
Today thanks to user created video online at YouTube, totally anonymous people can become famous overnight. (My wife and I call this phenonymous.)
Google is engaged in a battle to do to the Internet what Microsoft did to the PC–create a brand new operating system to become the center of our daily routines.
Most of us can’t even go a day without having Internet access.
As the "we are the web" video says, we have a lot of things to rethink and it’s probably good to take the long view with an open mind and forget about what limits we think we’ll run into.
0 Responses to “The Long View”
Leave a Reply