[kictanet] 1995 article on why the Internet won't work!

[Agosta Liko]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554

The Internet? Bah!
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana

By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK

>From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two 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 or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy
and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting
workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak
of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and
business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And
the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in
no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can
take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will
change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, 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. 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. How about electronic publishing? 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.

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. 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. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15
minutes 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. None answers my question, and my
search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many
connectios, try again later."

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. 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 to use in classrooms and
require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames--but
think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational
filmstrip of decades past? 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. 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 business in an afternoon than the entire Internet
handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money
over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most
essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

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. 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.