[WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:07 AM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>
> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.

So cool!

>The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,

reddit.com pretty much did for me.

> no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

Jury's still out.

>and no computer network will change the way government works.

How did Obama get elected again?

>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.

Answer: blogging.

>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.

Answer: Kindle. Or any netbook, really.

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

He was wrong about the books, but right about the newspapers. We don't
"buy" them.

>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,

Answer: Wikipedia

>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.

Boy, that sure changed. I love what the internet has done to state
government departments in particular - you can get access to so much
information so easily now.

>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.

I'm going to agree with him on this one.

>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.

Wow. I can't even imagine buying plane tickets any other way. (Oops,
not quite true, I bought a ticket at an airport in Borneo last month).
 Restaurant reservations...well some sites do it, I'd still ring up to
be safe. Negotiating contracts by email, definitely.

>Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Because malls are about much more than buying stuff. They're places
that deranged people go for pleasure. The net has replaced a huge
chunk of my offline shopping though. Food and secondhand books I
always buy offline. Everything else is probably 70% online.

>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.

Not anymore it's not. I've made tame enquiries into a couple of
products and been followed up by extremely keen salespeople. But as
pointed out, they're redundant in general.

>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.

Twitter, facebook, IM, Skype. But he's still kind of right.

>No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert.

For once, he's dead on the money.

I actually love Cliff Stoll - I bought a hand-manufactured, signed
Klein bottle from him once. But it's interesting to see how all sorts
of assumptions and prejudices can make you so, so wrong. It appears in
retrospect that the correct vision for the future would be "anything
that genuinely relies on physical presence and sensation, like a rock
concert, can't be computerised. Everything else can, and will."

Steve