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.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Why [the] Web Won’t be Nirvana

Users at an internet cafe in China

The internet is a community like any other town in the world.  It has people, transportation, communication, media, and many other features of actual cities and towns.  The people that spend their time working and playing online have developed relationships with others in a way that people become friends in real life (I hate saying “in real life” too, because despite some arguments The Internet IS “real life”.  It just takes place in a different locale – anyways, I digress).

Transportation

Google is the backbone of Internet transportation, serving as the largest central hub for directing traffic.  There are other modes of transportation such as MSN, Yahoo, or the once defunct, rising once again Ask.com.  Unlike our physical world, we can transport ourselves directly to a new address.

We can also move fluidly from one website to another – each link becoming a road, moving away from where we were last.  I suppose some peoples’ goal would be to get as many roads leading to their house or place of business.  Others may even charge a toll to use their roads (subscription services).

Friends & Communication

The amazing thing about this new world is that the barrier for entry to communicate is extremely low.  Anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame by creating the next most popular viral video.  We can build relationships with people that we have never met in person before.  People even work for businesses from the other side of the world without ever setting foot in their physical offices.

We can build, maintain, and document our relationships with others on our websites, through Facebook, or through a much lesser known standard: XFN.  Sharing information with friends in our community is extremely easy – and almost overwhelming at times.  Many people blog, and those blogs can be aggregated to one place through RSS, putting so much information at our fingertips.

We talk through chat, web conferencing, and internet telephony like Skype.  Any person can stand at their podium on streaming sites like USTREAM or Justin.tv and talk to their viewers, not unlike a person standing at a podium in Central Park.  People can even get together for a quick soccer game in our virtual community.

Media

The new newspaper is Twitter and the new televisions are YouTube and Hulu.  Social media is adding new dimensions to media and news is being reported and shared at alarming speeds.  I find it amazing how quickly an Amber Alert can permeate Twitter even if it’s fake.

It’s interesting to see how traditional media is still having trouble keeping up and people that can adapt are taking advantage of that gap.  Internet performance marketers all over the world are stepping up and representing huge corporations and usurping advertising dollars from the traditional power houses.  This new media is so enticing for business, because compensation is based entirely on performance – much like 100% commission sales people.  No, it’s not like that.  It is that.  Businesses ALWAYS have an unlimited budget for positive returns on ROI.

So what other ways does the Internet seem like a small town to you?  or a big town?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: The Internet – A Small Town in Cyberspace