Why [the] Web Won’t be Nirvana

Cliffor Stoll is an astr0nomer and author.

Here is a Newsweek article published in 1995 by Clifford Stoll (<- Wikipedia). The original article is at Newsweek Here.  I’ve modified it to make more sense:

After two three and a half 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 spammer or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers (goToMeeting), interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms (Wikipedia). They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities (goToMeeting). Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems (eBay, Amazon, etc.). And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic (see: Obama and Twitter).

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper (New York Times, Newsweek, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher (College External Degree Programs and Online Degrees) and no computer network will change the way government works (Any .gov website makes getting info and forms a lot easier).

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet (Twitter), 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 (Twitter). 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 (Everyone Listens). How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc (iTunes, Audible, Kindle, iPad). At best, it’s an unpleasant chore (Environmentally friendly, easy, and you can do it while driving): the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can‘t tote that laptop iPad or Smart Phone 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 (hehe). Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data Google indexed, relevant data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking With volunteer editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland utopia of unfiltered relevant 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 (21 October 1805, Search time, 5.7 seconds). Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes seconds 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. Wikipedia was first and had the date in less that four words. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.” Fail Whale.

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 million. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. 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 easy to use in classrooms and require extensive almost no teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? Yes I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals.(eBay, Amazon, etc.) We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more fractions of the business in an afternoon entire lifetime than the entire Internet Amazon handles in a month hour? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t (PayPal) –the network is missing has a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople (Affiliates).

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate connect us from to 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.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway,” to be published by Doubleday in April.