How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted 259
Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
It's all about the Editor (Score:5, Insightful)
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. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.
Wow, he really missed the opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity (Score:1, Insightful)
Facebook and Myspace count as human contact?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
From the original internet criticism:
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.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
And he didn't have much of an excuse to bemoan the lack of human contact and virtual communities either... Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...
Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuckerberg and Anderson are not rich because they had vision to bring human contact to the internet.
Zuckerberg and Anderson are rich because they realized that most internet users cannot or will not learn to use use their computers well enough to handle an email application, an IM application, a news reader, and a web browser, and that most internet users are not online for content but for mindless entertainment.
Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my favorites was from Danny Hillis [wikipedia.org], a pioneer in parallel computing. "I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else asked, 'Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"
Years later, Hillis went back to the same hotel. He noticed that the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors. There was indeed a computer in every doorknob..
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
It was only until several years later when increased the storage, added color, and allowed it to work on PC did it take off.
Re:It's all about the Editor (Score:1, Insightful)
Even if it takes more time, from an idealistic standpoint it should be up to the user to choose what is important and what is not. Bonus points for true transparency, openness, and comprehensiveness of the data.
Risks of contrarianism (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:
Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.
While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.
Re:Government crackdowns (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. That was predicted back in 1949 [wikipedia.org]. Though he was off by a few years on the actual timeline.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
It also "won" because of the interface, something everybody on slashdot keeps ignoring. Do you remember what the interfaces of pre-ipod mp3 players were like? No comparison.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:4, Insightful)
But in modern industrialized societies, hypothetically turning off the entire Internet would have secondary effects on those who don't use it in their daily lives or work. Not that people would die in large numbers or anything.
Re:Things Change at a Rapid Rate (Score:4, Insightful)
and since it existed when they were born, my children will think there was always an internet and that it was always big, and that people always had a computer or four in their homes.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, don't you think that the automated and streamlined ordering systems that corporations use to reduce costs on necessary goods used by the poor would suffer?
It's necessary in the same way that roads and highways are necessary for the developed world. Sure, we could do without, but there would be a discernable difference if you removed either.
Re:It's all about the Editor (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the big failure of conventional journalism. They leave out a lot of important details and get what's left badly wrong. Just about any subject matter expert that examines the output of journalism as it relates to their specialty will find journalism shockingly bad. I suspect this is the true genesis of the demise of corporate journalism. The more interconnected people become, the more able people are to communicate about this sort of thing. People from different walks of life can share with each other just how WRONG journalists are.
There are journalists who are insightful and thorough, journalists who produce large quantities of poor quality output, and there are journalists with undisclosed biases or agendas. In these respects, conventional journalists are identical to "unconventional" journalists (independent internet journalists writing for small internet publications or blogs).
I'd argue that there isn't any more "conventional" journalism; all mass media publications are now easily subject to the same review/critique as the independent media, in near real time.
What you've pointed out is that most non-experts in a given field have a hard time understanding and accurately representing even slightly complex information from a given field of specialization. This difficulty is no different for "journalists" than it is for other non-experts. The problem is not that journalists are prone to be misunderstanding, but that people in general are prone to misunderstanding.
This is why the most respected "journals" are (and have been) "peer reviewed", that is, subject to review by other experts in the same field, before publication. So, why don't we call those experts "journalists"? The do publish in journals, after all.
Re:Interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
What are you like 4 years old? It took off immediately like it was shot out of a cannon, faster than the Sony Walkman did--is that not fast enough for you?
Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Risks of contrarianism (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:
Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.
Heh...these apology for bad predictions articles are always funny as hell, so do you know why you don't see more of them, even though "contrarianism helps sell magazines"? It's because the contrarians are usually right and then you don't have the apology article years later, it's just business as usual.
The unwashed masses suck at predicting the future. Think about the future predictions of the 50's and 60's and wonder why you don't have a flying car, a robot maid, and why even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday. However, the world is marvelously different than what it used to be, just in a completely different way than they predicted.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple knows their markets very well. The high-end Mac Pro tower is far, far easier to open and modify than any other tower case I've used. Lift a lever, pull away the side, and you have each access to everything [apple.com]. Because that's what most of the Mac Pro customers want. iPhone customers? Not so much.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't let this scare you or anything, but you know about ham radio? That chunk of spectrum and users whose motto is "when all else fails"? Who spend time supporting disaster relief and emergency services?
A lot of those folks are putting their eggs in the internet basket, relying on the internet to get email through when local communications systems go down. If the local internet goes down, so local email won't get through, they're planning on using HF or VHF radio to get email out of the disaster area and into the hands of state and federal agencies.
If the internet goes down on a large scale, those messages will go nowhere, and the senders won't know that they aren't going anywhere.
What's even scarier is the draconian anti-spam measures being used. If you aren't on the radio user's whitelist and you don't know the secret code to bypass it, your email won't go through. The bounce message doesn't tell you the secret, and it doesn't alert the intended recipient that you tried. You could be Barack Obama himself, and if whitehouse.gov isn't in the recipient's whitelist, your email won't get delivered. Users in a disaster area who want to turn this feature off cannot.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but of the people to which you refer, how many of them earn their living providing services to others? And how many of those others depend on the internet for their jobs?
The crew who repaired my roof or the guy who changed my oil might not depend directly on the internet, but he depends on my money, which does depend on the internet.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the way they didn't even have a power button?
I spent some time playing with my friends original b/w iPod a few years back and actually, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Then I spent three minutes trying to find the damn power button. Wow, that was an amazing design.
Re:Interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a matter of convenience. Things would be harder, and progress would be a little slower. A very small minority of people would feel the adverse impact in any significant way and they'll have to learn to live with it, but most people will go back to their televisions and newspapers and radios.
But it isn't as if everybody's going to go hungry all of a sudden, or if man-made structures are going to collapse.
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
You are not most people.
He did get some things right. (Score:4, Insightful)
*"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."*
That hasn't changed.
*"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact."*
Still no real change. Despite social networking sites. It just isn't the same.
His point about teachers is still true. Technology is secondary to good teachers.
I love this quote:
*"But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community."*
The interweb is still trendy and oversold.
So, somethings have not changed. Not at the core anyway.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. You could say the same about the paved road network.
Yes, life would go on if we had to revert to 30mph single lane dirt tracks. Yes, you would be quite able to live your life individually by avoiding the road network (not own a car, not ride the bus). Yes there are alternatives to the road (rail, aircraft, canals, etc.).
But that doesn't mean the road network isn't a necessity. If it were ripped up right now today then there would be serious repercussions- even for the minority who doggedly never use it. Businesses would crumble, quality of life would drop.
If the internet were switched off tomorrow, there would be repercussions. Even if you never use it yourself, it would still effect you.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well put. I recall reading an article some time back where some major executive was arrogantly dismissing the necessity of email and text messaging because *he* never used it, though he did acknowledge that his assistants did all his electronic communication. It was like someone claiming driving was unnecessary because they have a chauffeur.
Some people don't seem to get that just because they don't use personally use a specific innovation like the internet or evolutionary biology that they may still benefit from it or even be dependent on it.
Re:Internet search has come a long way. (Score:2, Insightful)
>The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.
Do you realize the monumental volume of blood, sweat, and tears that went into making Wikipedia? It's 1% technology, 99% human effort.
I don't think it was easy to imagine that hundreds of thousands of people would just suddenly start writing everything down. Not to mention, db-backed sites were so rare in '95 that Cliff Stoll may have never seen one.