The Internet? Bah (1995) | Hacker News Reader

The Internet? Bah (1995)

newsweek.com

116 pointsdnsworks71 comments

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

To be fair, now, fifteen years later, the hardware to make that reasonable is only just appearing. The vast majority of people has still never bought an ebook.

E-books or not, I'm still buying 90% of my books from Amazon. Which isn't a young company either.

I find it funny that pretty much everything in the first paragraph has actually happened to its fullest. Even the "human contact" he's using as a final argument... most people I know hold at least a couple of close relationships almost exclusively online. Often with family.

Makes me scared when I realize back then I'd have agreed with at least half of it. What is coming in the next 15 years?!

I never bought an ebook but I certainly do more than 95 percent of my reading on a screen.

(Considering that many people sit in front of a screen during their whole workday and read stuff I do not think that hardware was ever the problem. I do not know why people think they would be unable to read books on a LC Display when they have otherwise no problem staring at such screens for hours on end. It’s about image, availability and price, not technology.)

You're making several fundamental mistakes. First, for a lot of what you read on your screen you have no choice. Where else are you going to read it? So the equation there is whether reading on a screen is better than not reading the particular material at all. Whereas with e-books the equation is whether reading on a screen (and the other benefits of e-books) is better than reading a physical book. Given some of the less than desirable characteristics of reading text on an LCD those benefits may not be enough.

Second, you probably spend a lot more time reading on a screen than most people do. If your day job involves using a computer all day (which I'll hazard a guess to a reasonable probability of such, given that this is hacker news) then you'll already have internalized and accepted the tradeoffs of doing a lot of reading on an LCD. But to someone who uses a computer say 1/10th or 1/100th as much as you do they have yet to come to that bridge, and when they do they have a choice as to the technologies they use for screen reading, the slight benefits of e-ink may be enough for them, even if it isn't for you.

There are a lot of computer users in the world who have yet to read, say, 1 thousand words of paragraph after paragraph of text in a single sitting on a device. To them the differences between reading text on physical paper, e-ink, or an LCD may be much more significant than for those of us who already spend our days staring at monitors and feel comfortable doing so.

Reading on a LCD is definitely different (even harder) than reading text on paper. You need to get used to it.

But I would argue that more and more people are. And more and more might just be enough. A big minority in any richer country might just do the job.

I’m not sure whether LCDs will be inside the devices which finally bring digital books to the masses but I do think it’s a distinct possibility. I do think they are good enough.

But the idea is to envision what the future will be like. In the article he couldn't imagine the world as it is now. A simple idea like the newspaper being outdated was beyond him.

Next thing you know that crazy guy will be talking about laptops for young poor children around the world. This is absurd and clearly will never happen.

While Clifford Stoll has some useful points, in particular, "What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact." the majority of his essay is already starting to feel dated.

There is a fairly well known maxim (thank you google: http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/jan/11/embracing-uncertain...), that in the short term, we tend to overestimate and in the long term, underestimate.

Saffo, also has another great quote, "Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people’s. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that."

Regarding books - Already eBooks are starting to have an impact, I'm a pretty steady reader, and the groaning bookshelves and boxes (and boxes, and boxes) of books that I used to go through have given away to my Kindle (and iPhone Kindle).

Teaching is starting to undergo a revolution with sites like http://khanacademy.org.

I haven't purchased a physical newspaper in 2+ years - and I'm a newspaper Junkie.

Classifieds? I can't even tell you if my local newspapers have had them for the last I don't know _how_ long - who _doesn't_ use craigslist.

I could go on and on, but the interesting thing is, we're just _starting_ in on the Internet technology curve. The tools and systems we use today are going to look ludicrous twenty to thirty years from now.

I'll let Saffo have the last word:

"Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often."

Speaking of teaching revolution, there is something I'd have thought so blindingly useful and I still haven't been able to find: a site which would teach you basic English, no matter what language you came from.

It could easily be used by 4 billion people... eventually everybody _has_ to get online, and the value of the web is 1/100 without being able to read English. And yet my mother is still paying through her nose to take slow correspondence lessons, while I cringe every time I want to send her a link and can't.

When browsing Amazon.com, who thinks to themselves, "If I only had a salesperson..."

We've become each other's salespeople. I trust the reviews of 100 people on Amazon well over a single salesperson who has a vested interest in me making a purchase.

The only problem with their review system is that paid reviews can skew things. Still, I find that just reading a good sample (especially the negative reviews) and seeing if the points brought up in them pertain to me works very well.

If enough reviewers like a product, I trust in the majority opinion even if some people where paid for their responses.

the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Well that didn't take long to change.

I was talking to my wife today about how a great many people HATE being sold things.

Part of the reason is that most salespeople are all, "HEY! BUY SOME MORE USELESS CRAP!?!?" and not very "What can I do to help you, or make your experience here more pleasant?"

If you go to Whole Foods Market, all of the salespeople there are in the second category, which is why people enjoy shopping there even at the price points they charge.

That's a great widget you got there, one of our finest, let me ring you up.

Now... would you like the 24 month extended warranty? That widget is a piece of shit that is likely to catch fire the moment you bring it home.

"salespeople" have been replaced by "customer reviews". The quality of the information is better because the motivation is no longer "get you to spend as much as possible", but "help others find the products they need, and rely on others to help me find the product I need".

Much of the wrongness of the article is in this same vein. He gave a series of reasons why things didn't exactly, perfectly translate, but failed to recognize how new technologies and new communities would arise to fill in the gaps and improve the user experience. He saw the problems and assumed they wouldn't be fixed, while tech pioneers saw the problems and found ways to fix them (often using technology that was already being demo'd in 1995.)

For those of you who didn't know, Stoll is the author of "The Cuckoo's Egg", his (true) story of tracking down a hacker that broke into Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's computers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29 http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

He's also the Klein bottle guy.

I think the real mistake the author made here was looking at the technology of the time instead of the potential of that technology. That would be like looking at Project Mercury and saying "Man couldn't possibly land on the moon with that." And that's right. We didn't. It was only the predecessor to the Apollo program.

For several years he was able to make good bucks off his Ludditism - enticing some further hilarity from reviewers of his 2002 High-Tech Heretic . So that the Seattle Times said:

"Stoll's long experience with technology gives him authority. . . . His claims are based on facts, logic and common sense." --http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-Computer...

"Authority"? They forget to mention his capability as a far-sighted prophet :)

He fills a niche. The world requires a public face for every viewpoint. Alex Jones, Pat Robertson, Al Sharpton, The Crazy Guy Down The Street. Everyone with a viewpoint wants some more important authority to cite to support their viewpoint.

It took me 9 seconds to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar vs 15 minutes in 1995. Moore's law for information search?

If you have a mac, open Spotlight and type "battle of trafalgar." You'll get a result from Dictionary.app with the date of the battle and a very short summary.

The answer to his question now sits on the hard drives of millions of consumer computers around the world. This guy must be some sort of anti-psychic.

I just highlighted "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" from your comment, right-clicked chose "search google for..." from the resulting pop-up and had it in about one second.

I strongly suspect that no nearby shopping mall has done more business this afternoon the entire internet has this month, either. Kurzweil, this guy is not.

Why a day for a shopping mall and a month for the internet? Also, why just one nearby mall? Why not the entire internet vs. all shopping malls for an equal amount of time?

Of course, we'd have to ignore the business the shopping malls do over the internet. So maybe all in person transactions at all shopping malls vs. all consumer purchases over the web, for an equal period.

If this was Digg, I would have expected 23 comments thanking you for opening their eyes and highlighting this amazing feature in Firefox.

Then I remembered I was on HN and everything went better than expected.

While some of his points are still valid today, it's clear the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of disruptive innovations

It's easy to see what's disruptive once it's, um, disrupted. But we all still mistake a clunky version 0.1 for the limit of what a technology can achieve.

Most recent example: Twitter and everyone saying it will never make any money.

Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805), back when the people involved were probably sure ships would never be supplanted as the preferred method of travel across the ocean.

Incidentally, I found that date in about five seconds, with Chrome's address bar even auto-completing the name of the battle.

The article is amusingly myopic, and the author is completely unable to imagine a world (not far from his own) where his little niggles are solved.

The internet is a global network of computers. Even if some of the technologies built on it are limited (as many were in 1995), the underlying network is near limitless in potential. Underestimating that potential will always be a mistake.

I like to jokingly call google "my external memory". It's fast enough that I can actually use it as such in a IM conversation. When somebody mentions something I'm not familiar with (like a movie) it's usually faster to google it then to wait for them to answer my "what is X?".

A really big thing will be when we'll be able to do the same in a face to face conversation. I really understand why google is trying so hard to be mobile. Otherwise it would miss the next few big revolutions.

Last Christmas we were playing some kind of Jeopardy in my family and of course everyone was trying to use their portable wireless device to cheat one way or another. It's really an acceptably functional "external memory".

This also works well on pub trivia machines.

Some commenters agree that the internet hasn't led to meaningful social connection, but I disagree. Many shy people find it the key to their social life. It's kept me in contact with several college friends, and I now think our kids will know each other. It's a very connective medium.

Mad man with a moment of clarity: 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.

Earlier today I went to the Facebook profile of a friend of mine who lives out of state. He had uploaded a video of his child singing and had it on his profile.

There are many more means of human contact than meeting at a coffee shop.

Exactly. The internet is a complement to, not a replacement for, face-to-face contact.

See also: that little known and rarely used technology, the telephone.

The death of one form of social contact gives birth to others.

Today via Facebook I was able to set up lunch with a few people I haven't seen for months (one of them, years) - all effortlessly, all without having to track down contact information that in the old world would have been woefully out of date. All instantly.

Next week I'm going to be showing up to a random improv thing along with hundreds of random strangers whom I've never met before. I will likely chat with a lot of them, and maybe make a new friend or two. Try that before the internet.

Heck, on one of my subscribed subreddits someone has taken the liberty of setting up a weekly board-games-and-meetups night for community members to hang out. These people have never met prior to this, and save for a common interest in a website would never have met.

In my opinion, the most exciting new uses of technology today involve bringing people together in real life, creating a more social world.

TV isolated us. The web will bring us together.

I do agree with his remarks, though the internet has come quite a ways since then in adding "human contact." Things like video chat give me the opportunity to talk to people with more human contact than I would otherwise be able to because of distance. Overall though, despite all the things I like about the internet, it is not a substitute for going outside and talking in person.

If you actually read the article, you'll see many of his points are valid.

He has a handful of good points (eg. the importance of human contact), but most of his examples are laughable because he picked precisely the things that the Internet dominated (eg. daily newspaper).

His mistake was equating hype with falsehood—it's true that at the time people were predicting that you would do anything and everything over the Internet, and clearly that will not be the case anytime soon. However with technology as powerful as the Internet, it was crazy to assume that it would not change the way we live in any significant ways. Even trying to predict the things that wouldn't change proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for this guy.

He has a handful of good points (eg. the importance of human contact), but most of his examples are laughable because he picked precisely the things that the Internet dominated (eg. daily newspaper).

I wouldn't say the Internet dominated newspapers so much as newspapers imploded, and the web didn't. Stoll's perspective that the Internet won't replace high value content and human interaction any time soon was on the mark. He said that when I was just getting a 14.4kbit modem, and 15 years later I have an always on 15mbit connection that I use to wander the web aimlessly looking for well edited, relevant content. The good old things are gone, but where are the good new things? I think that we're still in the hype.

"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."

So he got the newspaper thing (partially) wrong. The government hasn't changed, nor has education. The truth of the education thing is this: you can learn anything on your own, but a teacher can tell you in 20 minutes what might take you a month to figure out by yourself. Government will take a long time to change. And (many) more people still rely on mainstream media outlets for their news than any other source (though they may get their news from said media outlet's online presence, rather than their print one.

http://www.khanacademy.org/ I'm positive that guy is a better math teacher than any classroom math teacher I've had, and everyone around the world can access it for free. An online teacher can be just as real as a classroom teacher. Online there is less distraction than sitting in the middle or back of a lecture, and you can control the pace to absorb every point by pausing and rewinding rathering than worrying about simultaneously copying notes before they are erased.

a teacher can tell you in 20 minutes what might take you a month to figure out by yourself.

A teacher who is obstinate in pressing mistaken notions on students can also undo in twenty minutes a month of the students gaining correct understanding by themselves.

What in-person teachers plainly provide better than online teachers is baby-sitting. What they usually do with more regulatory acceptance than online teachers is provide seat-time credentials.

See

http://learninfreedom.org/School_obsolete.html

for some critiques of school from the same era as the submitted article.

The internet allows everyone access competent teachers. There are so many learning resources with videos and how-to articles on a large range of topics. And the resources are extremely up-to-date. When something new is out you don't have to wait for an update to a textbook to be published or a teacher to learn it and include it in a lesson plan.

Teachers are only useful if they interact with you. Otherwise it's no better than a book.

Mentorship. That's what makes teaching useful.

I'm talking about good teachers, not cheap public high-school instructors.

Education has transformed significantly since 1995 because of the internet. Some good, some not so good.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learni...

Considering even the vaunted and once-great New York Times is having trouble just staying afloat due to online competition, I wouldn't say his newspaper point is partially wrong, it's entirely wrong. The internet has mopped the floor so hard with the newspaper industry it really can't be seen as anything but a complete coup.

Also, I disagree that most people will get their news from mainstream sources - personally with the recent Haiti situation I got far more up-to-the-minute news breaks from Facebook, Twitter, and other such sources than I ever got from CNN and the likes. In fact, I would say breaking news is something large news organizations are likely to lose entirely. Nowadays my only mainstream media consumption is almost entirely well-written essays and analyses on things, not raw reporting on a recent event. I predict as the "physical media" generation ages, and the young grow up with the internet being pervasive in their lives, this pattern will only continue to grow.

Considering that I can get a Masters in Computer Science from UIUC online, I beg to differ. http://cs.illinois.edu/online

Internet is already influencing governments to some extent. Rally in Moldova last year (which become a riot) was organized mostly with Twitter and Facebook.

For the point about government, see Wikileaks and Twitter/Youtube following the Iran election.

not really. He has perhaps only one valid point and that is that human teachers are very useful and they cannot be replaced by educational software. For all other things he was wrong. I mean salespeople??? ... when was the last time you thought to yourself "I wish there were more salespeople in my life" ...

He has perhaps only one valid point and that is that human teachers are very useful and they cannot be replaced by educational software.

No, that point wasn't even remotely valid, either. At least, not outside K12 education. Higher-ed teachers aren't being replaced by software, but by video lectures and peer groups.

Anyone who can't learn (for instance) math with Khan Academy and Wolfram Alpha wasn't going to learn it anyway, with or without a teacher.

He gave a talk at TED in 2006.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

"if you want to know what society is going to be like in twenty years, don't ask a scientist...I don't know..."

I guess he proved himself right.

Yeah, the Internet can be the good, bad, and the ugly. The good: I provide for my family of 5 by creating and maintaining web applications (an occupation non-existent at the time of my Univ. graduation); primarily because of the Internet I have a home office where, among other benefits, I have been set free from the unproductive, soulless cube-farm. Time would fail detailing other benefits such as enhancements in maps, search, discussion and in general increased access to knowledge. The bad: too much trivial information; work is anytime, anywhere -- no hard boundaries; and temptation for attention sucking ( as the author stated "this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.") away offline life.

The ugly: pornography and perversion at a click; anonymous rage;

Like just about every area of life we need discipline and balance.

What's pornography?

yet, everyday, we still see that kind of prediction on HN. "why google buzz won't take off" or "why the iPad is lame". People writing these kinds of title don't know more than anybody else so please stop talking about the future that way.

There have been a number of predictive clangers from people considered luminaries in the field of technology. Stuff like "we'll never need more that 640K of RAM". Humans have been doing this for centuries, and we'll continue to do it. While we're more advanced now than we've ever been, we're yet to think of our best ideas. I like the fact that we'll able to look back in another fifteen years and go "...didn't see THAT one coming".

The trick is to try to recognize the patterns in the errors he is making. It is remarkable how every one of the problems he raises has made a company or organization that solved it very successful.

all of the share icons below the headline are more than a little ironic

So basically reverse everything you see there and now you have everything that exists now. Way to be close-minded, some-Newsweek-egghead-writer.

Into the late 1990s I knew a few people who were of the opinion that the internet was just another fad which would pass by.

"I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two." Anyone else wanna puke after reading that?

Hahaha, thank you for posting this! It's fun going back and reading journalists' predictions.

"Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers."

this makes me very very happy:

" 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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com