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

[S.Murigi Muraya]

Quite interesting that am attending a Cisco Webex Training session being run
from RSA right now.

Am in Nairobi too :-)

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Agosta Liko <agostal at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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