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defrogITEM [via BoingBoing]: Someone’s gone and dug up an old Newsweek article from Clifford Stoll, in which he predicted in 1995 that the Internet would fail.
For example:
Some background may be helpful at this point.
In 1995, Negroponte wrote a book called Being Digital, in which he postulated that thanks to computers and the Internet, everything that can be reproduced in digital form will be, and will eventually compete with and replace the analog version.
A year later, Stoll – already somewhat well-known for helping catch a a KGB hacker in the early days of the Net – wrote his own book, Silicon Snake Oil (for which the above article is a teaser), in which he postulated that the Internet was way overhyped and would never replace human contact.
I read both books, having already read a lot about ways the Internet could change the old top-down media landscape. At the time, I thought Negroponte made the better case, if only because Stoll had a tendency to overhype the dehumanization of the Internet, and seemed convinced that given the choice, people would rather bake brownies and take long walks in the woods than spend time online in virtual realities.
But Stoll was right in that a lot of the promise of the Web was overhyped at the time. For me, it wasn’t the technology that was implausible but the timeline. I remember having dinner with a guy in 1997 who swore that by 2002, everyone in the First World would be buying everything online and having everything delivered to their doorstep, and “real” stores would disappear.
I didn’t buy it because it would require everyone being able to afford a computer and an Internet connection, and there would still be enough people offline to make meatworld stores a necessity. Maybe in 50 years, but five? That’s too much change in too short a time.
Still, 15 years later, I’d say Negroponte had a better grasp on the future – and what people would accept – than Stoll. I still have both books on my desk, and thumbing through them now, Stoll comes off looking far more horribly outdated.
To be fair, though, predicting the future is always tricky business, and it’s easy to point and laugh in retrospect from the second decade of the 21st century where we have Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Kindles and WoW, and where every newspaper has a web site.
And note that they haven’t yet replaced the analog equivalents, though that’s not to say they’ve had no impact whatsoever, especially in the case of music and newspapers. The digital and analog worlds will coexist for a long time to come – at least until access to the digital world is universal.
The one thing Stoll definitely got wrong was how the Internet would dehumanize communication. Looking at the success of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social networking media – to say nothing of good old fashioned IM – I’d say human comms is alive and well.
Yes, about 90% of it is badly typed trivial jabbering, attention-seeking trolls, paranoid conspiracy theories and LOLcat macros. But that’s not new. That was always there. It’s just all online where you can see it if you want. And they have filters for that. So I’m not too worried.
We’re the future,
This is dF
For example:
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. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Some background may be helpful at this point.
In 1995, Negroponte wrote a book called Being Digital, in which he postulated that thanks to computers and the Internet, everything that can be reproduced in digital form will be, and will eventually compete with and replace the analog version.
A year later, Stoll – already somewhat well-known for helping catch a a KGB hacker in the early days of the Net – wrote his own book, Silicon Snake Oil (for which the above article is a teaser), in which he postulated that the Internet was way overhyped and would never replace human contact.
I read both books, having already read a lot about ways the Internet could change the old top-down media landscape. At the time, I thought Negroponte made the better case, if only because Stoll had a tendency to overhype the dehumanization of the Internet, and seemed convinced that given the choice, people would rather bake brownies and take long walks in the woods than spend time online in virtual realities.
But Stoll was right in that a lot of the promise of the Web was overhyped at the time. For me, it wasn’t the technology that was implausible but the timeline. I remember having dinner with a guy in 1997 who swore that by 2002, everyone in the First World would be buying everything online and having everything delivered to their doorstep, and “real” stores would disappear.
I didn’t buy it because it would require everyone being able to afford a computer and an Internet connection, and there would still be enough people offline to make meatworld stores a necessity. Maybe in 50 years, but five? That’s too much change in too short a time.
Still, 15 years later, I’d say Negroponte had a better grasp on the future – and what people would accept – than Stoll. I still have both books on my desk, and thumbing through them now, Stoll comes off looking far more horribly outdated.
To be fair, though, predicting the future is always tricky business, and it’s easy to point and laugh in retrospect from the second decade of the 21st century where we have Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Kindles and WoW, and where every newspaper has a web site.
And note that they haven’t yet replaced the analog equivalents, though that’s not to say they’ve had no impact whatsoever, especially in the case of music and newspapers. The digital and analog worlds will coexist for a long time to come – at least until access to the digital world is universal.
The one thing Stoll definitely got wrong was how the Internet would dehumanize communication. Looking at the success of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social networking media – to say nothing of good old fashioned IM – I’d say human comms is alive and well.
Yes, about 90% of it is badly typed trivial jabbering, attention-seeking trolls, paranoid conspiracy theories and LOLcat macros. But that’s not new. That was always there. It’s just all online where you can see it if you want. And they have filters for that. So I’m not too worried.
We’re the future,
This is dF
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on 2010-02-28 07:09 pm (UTC)~M~
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on 2010-03-01 01:11 am (UTC)