This internet thing will never catch on

[rbcp]

Magus posted this article to his Facebook today.  It's written in 1995 by Clifford Stoll, telling us why the internet will never catch on and that it's just a passing fad.  He laughs at the idea of getting your news from the net, reading digital book and web sites replacing stores.  Today Clifford Stoll can be found selling things online.

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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.

Click here to read the rest of it.

[DT2G]

Interesting article. I'm writing a research paper and I think I can probably use this, so thanks a lot for sharing

[5m4llP0X]

Interesting insight on this.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that 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.

It's funny, I know a lot of artists dislike the internet for this reason. It gives even the most basic troll a chance to jump on a soapbox and trash someone relentlessly on their own fan site while still claiming "number one fan!" to them in person.

[murd0c]

Interesting insight on this.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that 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.

It's funny, I know a lot of artists dislike the internet for this reason. It gives even the most basic troll a chance to jump on a soapbox and trash someone relentlessly on their own fan site while still claiming "number one fan!" to them in person.

As an artist and a troll, neither of those things bother me.

[Magus]

Magus posted this article to his Facebook today. It's written in 1995 by Clifford Stoll, telling us why the internet will never catch on and that it's just a passing fad.  He laughs at the idea of getting your news from the net, reading digital book and web sites replacing stores.

But remember, his local mall sells more in a day than the Internet does in a month!

[bosco]

And you can't tote that laptop to the beach.

HA HA HA, OH WOW

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

And this dick really lent credence to the stereotype that people from MIT are always smarter than most.

MIT guy was only half correct, though. Newspapers are usually free online. Books are "free" too, if you know where to look

[rbcp]

In all fairness to this guy, the internet did seem pretty silly in 1995.  A friend tried to get me into it and I wasn't interested because BBSes were so much cooler.  And at that point, only nerdy people had been into BBSing for the past 10 or so years, so there was no reason to think that computers would ever catch on with normal people at all.  I sure didn't expect it. 

In 1995 I was really surprised when the Windows 95 launch seemed to be such a big deal to the media.