Time To Take the Internet Seriously 175
santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he's also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious. "6. We know that the Internet creates 'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. ... 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool."
Dear software engineers (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's come up with something to replace HTTP/JavaScript/Flash/what-have-you. It's huge waste, but even worse, distortion.
We have the technology. We can do better than this.
x86 assembly, bogus sessions, they do not have to be fate.
Right? Right?
condition: buzzword alert (Score:4, Insightful)
My language parser borked on 'cybersphere.' The words 'cyber' and 'virtual' leave a terrible aftertaste making whatever came later deteriorate into gibberish.. oh wait, this whole thing is gibberish to begin with. gibberish that seems (not entirely sure) to be a justification for everyone to throw their data (and I mean ALL their data) into the public space for the sake of...I'm not entirely sure, but I'll assume it's in the interests of whatever social/political/economic institutions he's a member of.
I know, how about letting the user decide the 'how' as well as the 'what' when it comes to interfacing with the technology at his disposal? I know, I know, that would be asking people to think for themselves for a few nanoseconds and we can't have that or else the terrorists win, the children lose, and 'freedom' dies. damn, what was I thinking? Gotta dumb everything down so even the most dull witted soccer mom can process it without the knees jerking upward..
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take the internet seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
Arbitrary Problem Creation (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if he predicted Nostradamus and first described self-sustaining fusion. The points and problems brought up are in large part already known and understood in other terms, with many of them dismissed by those who understand the problems in the terms commonly used.
6. The internet does not create information overload. It doesn't create information, or anything for that matter. It is constructed and filled by people who either handle the information load well or do not (hence over-load). The number of sources and amount received from them is under the control of the receiver. This is only a problem if the person does not develop a suitable technique for handling the flow, or is prevented from using it. Simultaneity is not a way to handle a large flow except in unprocessed pass-though. Regardless of the technologies that might be employed for any of this, sucessful collection of new material requires serial reception with the majority of attention focused on the item is interest.
Far more useful in developing the ability to absorb more information faster is the concept of 'media richness'. Plain text is just that, very plain, while human behavior is very rich (language plus nonverbals, etc.). Most of the net is low richness. It could be made more dense, but to be richer would then also have to be made cleaner, with less noise within the signal.
14. Creating your own new ideas and presenting them as validated concepts by comparing them with existing concepts is a technique well used in fiction writing. In non-fiction people expect to be able to compare the old and new and see justification for why the latter is useful before they should be expected to see arguments as to why one is better. Nobody can agree with what they can't understand. You can't even say to understand it if you can't explain it, you can only say you know what you mean.
I strongly recommend getting a job selling, installing and supporting a large installation so you can see just how much thought and work goes into making the internet happen. It has never just happened on its own.
Not really the internet (Score:2, Insightful)
The article says "internet", but it really means "the HTTP based family of applications that use the internet". Sometimes a customer gets me by mistake when they need help because "their internet is down". I start to get mad because of self contradictory statements, but then I remember that they really mean, "my web browser stopped working". (You can tell I'm not really tech support because next I try to find out what browser they are using, and they are never able to tell me. Which means they are using IE.)
Having cleared that up, I can only see consolidation of HTTP applications under some super googly company (perhaps one the article writer envisions heading) as making things worse. I suggest that clutter in your web browser is not much different that clutter in your house. Get a book on Feng Shui or equivalent and start deleting the stuff that isn't helping you (making you happier, needed for work, etc).
P.S. I discovered a very important, but little known principle of error page design. If you put something in giant type at the top of the page, no one reads it. It you put it in little bitty 6 point type at the very bottom, everyone will read it. Even if they need to use their magnifier app. I can't explain it (it must have something to do with lawyers), but now that I know, I save a lot of frustration by putting the most important message in little bitty type at the bottom. (I still leave it at the top in big type also in case any old fashioned types like me see it.)
Re:Dear software engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
replace HTTP/JavaScript/Flash/what-have-you
Every time I do "web development", I feel like I'm duct taping popsicle sticks together to build a house and then throwing in a bit of mud to seal the holes. Even after 10+ years everything still feels like a really bad hack/kludge/bodge.
The question is how accurate are the predictions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone can make a prediction. I'll make a prediction right now that one day we'll have a man on Mars.
The problem is how ACCURATE is the prediction. And his predictions are pretty useless. They're filled with current buzzwords and have no falsifiable content. Take prediction #5:
WTF? I'm not going into whether a search engine is an "easy problem". Everything is easy once it has been done by someone else.
But why does he believe that finding PEOPLE is an issue? This is the INTERNET. You can find published information ABOUT people. But PEOPLE are not abstracted and defined on the Internet.
And yes, in the "future" this "problem" will be "solved". When, how, where and by whom is skipped. So this "prediction" cannot be falsified. Therefore, it can never be shown to be wrong.
That article is crap.
Contradiction. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's "...someone worth paying attention to..." but he cannot make decent predictions about the material he is supposed to be worth listening to about?
He cannot even clearly define the buzz words he fills his "predictions" with. That article is not worth reading.
Taming the Natives (Score:3, Insightful)
Taking the internet seriously is what leads to all these "internet laws" that slashdot seems to rally against. In fact, the internet's existence as an international object that isn't technically, on the whole, legal in most jurisdictions, for one reason or another, is due in part to the internet not being taken seriously. Now, people are taking what they read online reasonably seriously; as seriously as any other medium. The internet is now no longer just for geeky adults, but also for children, and as such, a large portion of the population will look to have it censored or at least rated, just like any other medium (the logistics of such a task is another issue entirely).
The days of the internet being a wild west of vocal freedom are in danger of coming to a close, for as much as living in a wild west can be exhilarating and can make you feel more free, there will always be people who want to develop it to make it as safe as the colonised areas.
Detracting Point 3# (Score:4, Insightful)
3. Here is a simpler puzzle, with an obvious solution. Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished?
Free speech, that's what. Not only free as in libre, but free as in gratis. It's possible to replicate ideas across the world at real-world cost far too small to meter.
One of my ancestors wrote a book, the only copy of the manuscript was destroyed when the house was flooded by a nearby river. The publishers also lost the only other copy of the text, but the family considered they'd be unlikely to actually accept it and publish.
So one can see the fundamental advantage of not being bound by a pencil or a typewriter. In the information age what we really have in excess is truly inexpensive duplication.
It's ironic then that data can still go missing, although this is for other reasons rather than cost of making a backup, like intellectual property.
The question the author poses is not quite the right one to ask. What has been ubounded by digital word processing is quantity. Quality is different, a subjective and arbitrary value.
Looking at it another way, I consider readily ubiqutious free speech too cheap to meter as a pretty nicequality.
Indeed the 'du-' in duplication implies you create a second identical copy which is what you'd have to do with a pen or typewriter. This word is no longer accurate for what is possible with the Internet.
Gelernter who. . ? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it seems that David Gelerter was blown up by the Unabomber, survived and wrote a book [amazon.com] about the experience. In a cavalier attempt to "Take the Internet Seriously" I dredged up two reviews from Amazon's customer comments which show opposing valances of political opinion regarding the book's content. I thought it might help to explain the kind of filters Mr. Gelerter views the world through and thus help one decide whether his little treatise on the Internet is worth anything.
Review Number One. . .
"Drawing Life" is by David Gelernter, a computer science professor who survived one of Ted Kaczynski's mail bombs.
The book is about a well educated, intelligent man who has descended into a fear of the future and a hatred of the society that nurtured him, who dreams of a glorious American past that never really existed, who has written a venomous yet pedestrian political tract that would never have been printed without the author's notoriety, and who has come to the conclusion that sometimes people must be deliberately killed to remake society.
This book is also about the Unabomber.
Gelernter has endured an awful lot, and for this one is prepared to grant him slack. If he's cranky, he's certainly earned the right to be this way.
Yet, I've come away disappointed, not just with "Drawing Life," but with Gelernter himself. He is a profoundly bitter man who believes modern society has been ruined not just by the Unabomber but by the likes of unwed mothers, liberals, lawyers, feminists, intellectuals, working mothers, left-wing journalists, Hillary Clinton, and the usual gang of suspects straight from Rush Limbaugh's enemies list.
Tiresome and unoriginal. Not worth reading.
And David, enough with the kvetching already!
Review Number Two. . .
One of the most powerfully written and elegantly thought out books I have ever read. Should be mandatory reading for every American. I used to think only Vietnam veterans had this kind of sane view of the world after adversity. I was wrong. Buy it, read it, pass it along.
Right. So Gelernter is passing judgment on the great social commons known as the Internet, is he?
I'll pass, thanks.
-FL
I saw the same thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure if this is the same guy, but I think it is. In the video I saw the concept was called a "lifestream" then as well.
To me the idea also seems bad. I understand the motivation, he was trying to get people away from filesystems and into some more natural system for understanding how to find data. But temporal based is just not it. Humans can have a hard time ordering things absolutely in time, so to make access time based only obscures how to get to things, and also makes things that happened long in the past very hard to access - basically like storing all data in an array instead of a hashmap. People want to be able to get to things quickly and a time based interface does not really help much with that except for the most immediate things.
Re:Dear software engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is. You have a sessionless protocol trying to do sessions. Amusingly enough written on top of a connection based protocol (so you have a session built in- the TCP connection). You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays. You have a language that they had so much faith in they decided to name it after another popular language in hopes people would confuse them. And that language has no built in method for transfering data to/from the server or doing RPCs, you have the whole AJAX hack thrown in on top to do that. There's nothing about the whole stack that's well designed for modern uses. But its universal, so we're stuck with it unless Mozilla and MS work together to push out something new.
Not creation, observation (Score:2, Insightful)
The fundamental difference between your analysis and his writing is that you are thinking of technical concerns while he is thinking of people first.
The internet does not create information overload.
Not by itself it doesn't. What he has observed is the universal truth that humans in combination with the internet produce information overload. It allows us such easy access to information that was can (and do) become overloaded in the mass of it. It allows so many people to create information that independent of anyone consuming it, the great mass of it is still there waiting to fall on you like an over-stuffed closet when you go looking.
The number of sources and amount received from them is under the control of the receiver.
And people never overeat because after all, the amount of food intake is controlled by the receiver.
People are not good at turning off the spigot.
Simultaneity is not a way to handle a large flow except in unprocessed pass-though.
Now you are attacking his proposed solution instead of his observation. But I think you should keep that distinct.
Plain text is just that, very plain...Most of the net is low richness. It could be made more dense, but to be richer would then also have to be made cleaner, with less noise within the signal.
I disagree vehemently that plain text is "very plain". The right words can be far more illuminating than any video, as long as you are able to assemble root meaning in your head. Video can be better at building context but I think video lacks the fundamental power that raw text can deliver many concepts, no matter how tightly you edit.
14. Creating your own new ideas and presenting them as validated concepts by comparing them with existing concepts is a technique well used in fiction writing....
If you are writing this paragraph in response to his point 14, I'd say what he was talking about has totally eluded you. He's not talking about physical structure, at all. In fact he never really had a thing to say about physical structure.
it already exists (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called usenet.
The web 2.0 version is RSS feed of a blog (woohoo). And the application is an RSS agregator.
Taken to it's logical end point you get Lotus Notes.
Sokal Affair part 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually read the article, it reads like one of those hack academics in 1995 trying to sound hip (and/or pompous) by writing long tedious screeds using technical words they don't understand, to discuss a culture they have no experience with. About 1/3 of the article is about how great the guy used to be and how important and relevant his every utterance is. However, I'm not buying it.
I think its an elaborate hoax, like a modern "Sokal affair", and most of you fell for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [wikipedia.org]
'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source.
Yes, access to information without the mediation of the academics and priesthood, and control by multinational corporations is a big problem, for them. Not so much for everyone else. I think we'll survive despite their best FUD.
The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast -- especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload.
Sorry teacher I couldn't read chapter 3 last night because chapters 4, 5, 6 ,7 all exist so I was too intimidated to read chapter 3. I can't read my slashdot firefox tab because I have other tabs open. WTF is this guy talking about?
But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate,
I strongly suggest each user operate their own mouse, as opposed to operating each others mices. My kids figured this out around K or first grade, although their previous failure to follow that rule was probably more sibling rivalry and/or comic relief rather than actual ignorance.
and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information -- his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts.
Translation: Google docs, gmail, and google calendar is really cool. Facebook too. Thanks for letting us know, academic dude, without you guys we'd never have known!
To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis
Cool idea dude, like a log file, but on the web. I'm sure no one would ever think of putting a log file on a web. Actually the log file could be human generated prose and comments instead of the insights from my /var/log/syslog. Why, we could call it a web log. Or even a 'blog.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
Stagnant pool... thats kuro5hin, right? information-in-motion, thats like the front page of slashdot.
Come on Alan Sokal, admit it, you're the one behind this hoax, aren't you?
Re:Impossible. (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. Like any good charlatan fortuneteller the man keeps to the vague and puts many things in the form of questions which he can claim to have predicted either way they turn out.
Some of the "Predictions" are really just calls for what he wants in the computing world. One Internet interface? Cloud computing ruling all? He strikes me as the type who can't see the computer world beyond windows or purely business needs. He even sorta looks like Dilbert's pointy hair boss to go along with the spew.