<div>Quite interesting that am attending a Cisco Webex Training session being run from RSA right now.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Am in Nairobi too :-)<br><br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Agosta Liko <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:agostal@gmail.com">agostal@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote"><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554" target="_blank">http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554</a><br><br>The Internet? Bah!<br>
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana<br><br>By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK<br><br>>From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995<br><br>After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a<br>
gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even<br>caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy<br>and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting<br>workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak<br>
of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and<br>business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And<br>the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.<br><br>Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in<br>
no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can<br>take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will<br>change the way government works.<br><br>Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board,<br>
allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out,<br>leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply<br>and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more<br>closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles,<br>
harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few<br>listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc.<br>At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky<br>computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote<br>
that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT<br>Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight<br>over the Intenet. Uh, sure.<br><br>What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one<br>
big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness.<br>Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a<br>wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's<br>worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of<br>
the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15<br>minutes to unravel them--one's a biography written by an eighth<br>grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third<br>is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my<br>
search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many<br>connectios, try again later."<br><br>Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for<br>government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in<br>
Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position<br>paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of<br>computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a<br>good omen.<br>
<br>Point and click:<br>Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that<br>multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily<br>learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored<br>
software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education?<br>Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and<br>require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames--but<br>think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational<br>
filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three<br>great teachers who made a difference in your life.<br><br>Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog<br>shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline<br>
tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate<br>sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local<br>mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet<br>handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money<br>
over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most<br>essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.<br><br>What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.<br>Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities.<br>
Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat<br>line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No<br>interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live<br>concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the<br>
Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of<br>knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on<br>earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration<br>is legion and where--in the holy names of Education and<br>
Progress--important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly<br>devalued.<br><br>STOLL is the author of "Silicon Snake Oil--Second Thoughts on the<br>Information Highway," to be published by Doubleday in April.<br>
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