Bad predictions about the internet
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Minitel was a pay service; almost everything cost. The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much and that bandwidth would become so cheap.
Another huge surprise was that people would create so much content (including really good content) for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge, in hundreds of languages, thousands of times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica, that was created by random people and experts around the world almost entirely without payment.
Of course I'm talking about Wikipedia above, but that's just one of thousands of outstanding Web resources that people created for free.
I can just imagine the people's reactions 15 years ago: Why would anyone do that for free? Wouldn't the government shut it down? Who would pay to run the servers? Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. You might get a few random people to write, but no subject-matter expert is going to waste their time.
This wasn't too much of a leap for me. Microsoft Encarta shifted its information from CDs to the internet. And when you think about the whole premise of the internet, it was a tool for researches to share information. Remember all the university hosted sites packed with information? Now give all these people an easier place to publish their information while also reaching a wider audience.
One of my favorite pages from this era is probably this tide chart by someone at University of Nevada, Reno:
http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.htm...
And Stanford CS guys publishing their outdoor excursions:
Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep.
Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.
I think you would need to clarify to the person that there are just as many volunteer editors as there are volunteer writers. And then, perhaps, take them through a thought-experiment where fifty people are, in parallel, handed a copy of something and asked to mark it up for spelling and grammar errors. Even if they're all amateurs, the union of their annotations is likely to asymptotically approach (or even exceed) the results of a professional editor. Copyediting is actually uniquely suited for this sort of thing; it's, as they say, an embarrassingly parallel problem.
(Structural and content editing not-so-much, and Wikipedia indeed has deficits in those areas.)
I read that Germany had something similar called BTX from Bundespost, but that died a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
As it was a pay as you go, it was a cash machine for FT/orange (and marginally for Teleroute) we had to keep the minitel infrastructure alive and in sync with the website and rest apis. Mixing state of the art webservices and decade old infrastructure was a nice challenge.
The thing we dread the most: having to change graphical elements in videotex format.
I used to have a minitel in my collection of oddball terminals when I worked for BT
Once I finally got my hands on the serial cable needed to connect the family's Minitel to my first computer, an Amstrad CPC6128, I was in business... As if by magic, a new game had teleported through the telephone network, materializing on a previously blank floppy disk. My 9-year old mind was well and truly blown! This was 1989 and I had just downloaded a game.
Never mind that the transfer took an eternity, resulting in a hefty charge to my parents' phone bill. Never mind that I had very little interest in the game itself -- it was only Bubble Bobble, after all. No, the downloading process is what fascinated me. A whole new world of possibilities had just opened up.
But a year later I was crestfallen: we had moved to the United States and there was no Minitel. Perhaps fortuitously, there were no Amstrad computers either. The complete lack of Amstrad software stateside was solid ground for requesting a new computer. Now armed with a brand new 286 PC and a 2400 baud modem, the Minitel was soon forgotten as I discovered the joys of local BBSes, inevitably ending up running a rather popular one of my own.
America may not have had the Minitel, but it more than made up for it with a thriving BBS scene, fostered by those gloriously free local phone calls.
Other areas, like Atlanta, had unlimited calling over a wide area, while rural areas often only offered toll-free calling within town, or perhaps to one or two nearby towns.
I miss the local BBS scene of that era, but I don't miss the hassle of analog modems, long-distance charges, and (by today's standards) laughably slow speeds. Even a low-end smartphone is light-years ahead of 1980s tech.
Amazingly, FidoNet is still a thing, though many of its systems are now on the internet instead of analog modems. It might come in handy again if the internet apocalypse happens.
There was a failed attempt by a Silicon Valley company, "101 Online", to deploy Minitel terminals in the US. The terminals were available in electronics surplus stores for years.
But I'm afraid that even in the DC metro area, among French embassy personnel no less, few people knew about such a thing. We certainly didn't. Most French folks who missed the Minitel just ended up subscribing to one of the major online services of the time, namely CompuServe and Prodigy.
Besides, without the benefit of those giant billboards featuring topless young ladies[1] the Minitel never stood a chance in the US.
[1] Was it 3615 ULLA? ;)
People might not realise just how eye-wateringly expensive these services were.
In 1988 Compuserve charged $11 per hour. (Very roughly, that's $22 today).
I'm not sure what Prodigy charged, but it's amazing how much people used to spend on very slow online connectivity.
This doesn't sit right with me. It's certainly not being treated as one. I keep encountering "free wifi" hotspots - unencrypted, slow networks asking you to get your credit card out for more than 5 minutes of their time.
I was just in germany last week. In a public airport, the wifi was so monetized I felt like I was in the iOS port of a facebook game. Had the choice between that, or some even worse sitekiosk locked down piece of crap.
I wonder when this will change. When wifi will be as abundant and accessible as water in a city. (Although Germany is a terrible example for this - good luck getting a glass of tap water there). It's funny-sad to contrast the wonders of the internet, to the unending shithole that is internet access in 2016.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has 30 articles, almost every single one was and is being trampled on everyday.
Having the right to internet doesn't mean that someone else has a duty to provide you with a (free) internet connection, it means that forcibly preventing you from procuring an internet connection is not allowed (as opposed to, say, drugs, which you CAN be forcibly prevented from procuring).
Compare freedom of expression: Nobody can forcibly prevent you from expressing yourself, but also, nobody has a duty to enable you to express yourself.
We are told practically every day that terrorists, paedophiles, and werewolves (I made that one up) hide behind the shield of human rights, thus threatening us all, and if you're a good citizen you don't need human rights because you've done nothing wrong.
The current government in the UK has a manifesto commitment to repeal human rights legislation, and much to the relief of terrified voters, intend to follow through on it.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/63635/human-rights-act-will-be-scra...
The public WiFi is terrible though, I agree.
Wifi in Germany is a bad example because not only is there less demand for wifi due to ubiquitous 3G/4G coverage at reasonable rates but wifi hotspot operators also face liability for the traffic they carry.
In Europe there isn't an expectation of free public wifi as everybody has a smart phone with 4G.
Or is it that without current bandwidth, that even basic items (such as sharing low resolution pictures) would limit it to those who have enough patience? And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses? Is the eye candy what actually sells the net to the average person (in order to obtain critical mass)?
Now there's an interesting typo. (Or was that intentional?) Strangely fitting, even.
How the web looks has definitely changed with technology as we progressed from HTML -> Flash sites -> HTML5 and single-page web app sites, and of course now we can have streaming video that works as opposed to Quicktime or RealPlayer movies.
And when you think of Twitter's rise, it's essentially blogging shrunk to one-liners, but what made it different was the ability to aggregate everyone's stream of consciousness to a single feed as opposed to browsing through a newsgroup, blog ring, or RSS reader. This couldn't happen without technology (though I guess a parallel could be forum threads where everyone posts their clipboard contents at that moment).
In terms of ecosystems, I feel like they haven't changed too much. I checked Alexa's Top Sites and was able to draw parallels to most of them except for Wikipedia and to a certain extent YouTube. Collaborative editing of a collective source of (arguable) truth is definitely something of the 21st century, and YouTube's celebrity videologgers didn't quite exist unless you count the old Justin.tv (and that still required technology).
> And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses?
I would say the ease of expression is what brings in the masses. People may seem passive when they consume information now, but they still want to interact, and they do now do that through re-tweets or comments. I do think long-form content is diminishing because of our medium.
Not only was it much faster to browse locally, but it also saved money since connections were pay-per-minute.
Whilst social media sites would still work under such restrictions, I think there'd be less emphasis on short back-and-forth conversations, and maybe less of a 'walled garden' effect; since the content would be saved locally, I imagine a variety of 'Facebook reader' applications springing up, scraping and presenting the information in different ways.
There would also be implications for the ads and tracking which many sites subject their visitors to.
Large parts of the Internet are essentially nothing more than shipping text to users. Yet almost everyone doing this does so with hundreds of kilobytes of javascript. There's an almost crazy tendency to stuff all kinds of functionality into it that nobody asked for (e.g. news pages showing popups that a new item appeared on the startpage). Pretty much all of that would work with 1998s Internet without a whole lot of loss.
Youtube is a more extreme example, but even there: The resolutions they support today are probably irrelevant for more than 90% of the content.
The Microsoft Network (MSN v1, MSN dialup) failed spectacularly and the WWW won, Bill Gates rewrote the whole book in less than a year, the paperback edition already featured the WWW instead of Information Super Highway and MSN/Microsoft Network. Windows 95 shipped with MSN integration, an addon "Plus" CD shipped Internet Explorer 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up#Early_history
First and foremost, it wasn't even a prediction. Second, his comments concerned anonymity within groups and communities, not general demographics, i.e. all users of Twitter. The referenced study linked to by the Guardian (statistically illiterate as ever) article also fails to demonstrate anonymity as a primary cause of abuse, as the author seems to imply, albeit in a passive-aggressive manner.
Plus, of course, there are particular topics that are much better suited for one style or the other, but in general, a competent meat teacher is better than a competent silicon one.
... for now, and even then I'm not so sure.
Edit: And what about a competent teacher that records one lesson and broadcasts it to millions?
[1]A simple example - I self-taught myself guitar using online resources. I wasn't great, but I seemed to be doing what all the various resources were saying to do. Eventually I got tired of always being terrible, and shelled out for a teacher. In the first couple of weeks, he had fixed half-a-dozen tiny issues with my technique, which added up to make a terrible cacophony. I'd never be able to do that with the online resources.
Another example, from when I was a practical class demonstrator for a biology-based class in the '90s. There was a hue and cry about how all lessons of the future would be digital and no more lab animals would have to die (toads, for us). I countered with "how are you going to have a video show you how it feels to tie a ligature too loose or too tight?". Likewise, David Attenborough's documentaries are sterling, but they're not as good as going to the place and experiencing it in person.
Physical skills like the above are clear examples, but even for a standard lecture, human beats video-of-human - how many of us have been in a lecture when someone asks a 'stupid question' that clears up a misconception for everyone?
Good digital lessons are great for scale, but a good meat-based teacher is better. Of course, bad versions of either can be downright destructive...
Being from India, I had pretty bad teachers in college. If it wasn't for MIT opencourseware, and other videos I found online, I wouldn't have learned anything at all.
That's true, but it's one that has to be observed modulo the availability of competent meat teachers (skilled in the relevant subject). These are in short supply, certainly in the developing world -- but even in the schools and universities of the developed world, the availability of teachers in any subject is generally limited to a few hours a day, and for enrolled students only.
I think they should be seen a complementary, especially for younger students, but the availability of a competent silicon teacher in any of a wide range of subjects, for anyone, anytime, anywhere is huge.
What about a combination of the two[1]? I.e. recording digital lessons and then using a community question and answer forum to fill in the gaps.