This Newsweek editorial by Clifford Stoll, from 1995, is quite amusing due to all the things he got wrong. I've been a Newsweek reader since the 1970s, so I'm sure I read this article, but I don't recall it. Lines like this one, stated with such conviction, are the sort of thing that can easily come back to bite a person in the butt:
"Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is 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."
Uh, well, "replacement" may still be in the future, but
co-existence has settled in nicely. What's striking, along with the miscalculations and misperceptions, is Stoll's inability at the time to envision a possible future, to imagine how things could adapt, to consider the creativity of the people who would be using the internet to make it more manageable.
He tackled a number of issues that the internet was supposed to make easier. Here's one:
"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 connections, try again later.'"
He never considered that someone, many someones, would find ways to help with the noise. That people would organize what's online. That search engines would improve. That
Google would come along and customize searches, create advanced and scholarly searches, that online encyclopedias, while imperfect, would bring data together for people, like
Wikipedia, or even
About.com. He never considered that libraries would step in and bring worthwhile databases together, such as the
Internet Public Library and
The New York Public Library, along with thousands of other libraries (public and academic) offering some sort of online experience.
I really like this bit, though:
"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."
Uh huh. He couldn't envision
eBay,
PayPal (which has had a major impact on how many people do business),
Amazon.com, the online services offered today by brick and mortar stores, and others. Then again, he couldn't envision
Second Life,
MySpace, and
FaceBook, either, apparently. He couldn't see how the internet could bring people together, in cyberspace and sometimes, in person.
His editorial is a classic example of the risks of stating things so emphatically, because that almost guarantees you'll be proven wrong someday. Just because the internet hadn't realized its potential in 1995, and likely hasn't reached its full potential yet, didn't mean it wouldn't someday. I'm really happy he was wrong.
Thanks to
Miss Cellania for the Newsweek link.
~~~o0o~~~