Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
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.
Most of those came true.
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."
And yet.. the substance of it is so true. When everyone has a voice, it's hard to know what to listen to. Merit tends to rise, but so does misinformation. The weirdest part is, misinformation != lying. Most people spreading misinformation genuinely believe it.
Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps: lacking editors, people you know tend to be a reliable source of information. It's also possible to express yourself without fearing criticism. I wonder what the next 30 years will be like.
It feels to me the pace of change has slowed though. Maybe that's the way innovation goes. Sometimes in big bursts but mostly incremental.
I agree that small group conversations are probably the next wave of social media, because you need that circle of trust to be fully expressive.
If I had to guess, I would say we will perfect VR over the next couple decades and that we will replicate some of the brick and mortar experiences that way, but it will still not ever quite replace in person interaction. There's always going to be that uncanny valley between the cyber world and the real world.
This lead to needing to install stuff like Trumpet Winsock.
This mirrored the local networking capabilities between Windows 3.x and 3.11 Windows for workgroups.
Eventually, Microsoft would realize the need to include all of this by default in Windows, which led to the antitrust suit.
Real names attach constraints.
(Our undergrad computing lab had donated CAD workstations, so someone came up with a graphical display of the room, showing who was logged in where. The TA was displeased with me after figuring out that I had set my avatar to the "unoccupied" graphic. IIRC, he added a square outline for logged-in workstations to the display, around the same time.)
On the Facebook of the 1990s, Usenet, people routinely posted with their real name/identity and real email address, and message headers showed each server the post passed through from its origin, the IP address of the poster (which could and did result in doxxing) and often an "abuse@ISP" email address to complain about the post/poster.
Remember some of early Usenet, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had taken advantage of Californian naming laws (at the time, one could use almost any name one wanted, as long as it was consistent and not intended for fraud) to make their legal name more consistent with their online handle.
Mark V. Shaney is an example of a user who was not using their real name/identity (nor even had one).
Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thequux can tell us how pseudonymous usernames were in his time?
Quaxity quuxity,
Teitelman's InterLISP
Has a DWIM feature that's
Really a screw;
MacLISP has evident
Superiority,
Letting its customer
Mean what he do.Moreover, online forums (remember phpBB?) were overwhelmingly pseudonymous on practice.
finger rwj@cxa.dl.ac.uk
I hope that change is coming. Hope aside… I expect that, to riff on the quote, in the future, everyone will be globally infamous for 15 minutes.
Personally, I'd rather listen to 1 person criticize me than 10 people who praise me. That 1 critical person's going to have the most valuable thing to say that leads to improvement.
To an extent, note I'm talking about reasonable criticism, not assholes.
Isn't that already happening in the last five years, with more and more people abandoning "public" social networks and spending much more time in private friend chat groups?
Back in 1995 I remember I was very skeptical about what was then called radio modems. I thought that radio wasn't reliable and that Ethernet cables were there to stay forever. I didn't see laptops (let alone smartphones much later) becoming a thing. Though funny thing is, today in 2020, my laptop is connected via Ethernet at home. WiFi interference and congestion can at times become unbearable in a typical residential apartment block. You don't even know who or what creates interference so I was kind of right back then, but also terribly wrong in the long run.
I missed the practical aspect of radio communication within a short range, and I missed the trend that computing devices will get smaller and more portable over time. We thought at the time that computers will get more powerful but the size factor and the "desktopness" won't change.
The lesson for me is: don't try to predict the future of technologies. You can't just take a trend and extrapolate into the future: trends make unexpected turns and jumps all the time. This seems to be the only thing that's reliably predictable: that sudden turns and breakthroughs happen all the time and that each turn and breakthrough discovers some new practical aspect of a technology that was impossible to see in advance.
Could this be solved with the right wallpaper or paint materials?
To me, I have always found that the statement "truths are the best lies" is very correct.
To me, you can tell a little bit of truth, and leave a large amount of true information unsaid. However, that does not mean that the whole encompassing "truth" - whatever you end up expressing in the listener's mind as a whole - is true. This is not about whether they believe, but how they perceive. Whether the listener believes is another story.
We were in an IT school and I told them that I wanted to become a software developer.
They laughed at me and said they want to become admins, because basically everything has already be developed.
They had edonkey for music and films, they had video games, they had IRC for chat, what else was there?
Mostly agreed. There also many times when people should look at what they just wrote and say, "maybe I don't know enough about the topic to publish about it."
To choose a non-controversial topic: I have recently found the time to explore programming for microcontrollers. So much of the information that I come across is a simple rehash, to the point where it is clear that people are writing about their own experiences as soon as they learn about it. There is no depth of knowledge, which is problematic when the accuracy of information depends upon the details.
The problem of figuring out who to listen too usually comes down to figuring out who to filter out. In some cases it may be easy to do because the tone or content indicates the scope and accuracy of their knowledge. Unfortunately, it is a time consuming process since you have to hear what they are saying before you can decide whether they are worth listening to.
I've always been more inclined towards dinner party type experiences, but no one in my social circle has agreed. They all prefer the town square.
One of my best app experiences to date was with Snapchat, when it first became popular. Several of my friends started using it, and it became a way to share funny or interesting things we saw in our day to day. If I saw something that I thought Dave and Jess would find interesting, I'd just send it to those two. Because it was so ephemeral, it was great for small things -- the sort of things it wouldn't be worth creating a group chat for. It was the equivalent of walking down the street with a small group of friends, pointing at something you noticed, and saying "check that out".
Eventually, both Instagram and Snapchat started pushing the story format, and seemingly overnight the experience turned from a dinner party into a town square. No one was sharing with small groups of friends anymore. When you add to your story, it's for everyone to see. I never understood why my friends saw that as a replacement for what we had before. I think perhaps, for most people, the desire to be heard and noticed by a crowd outweighs any benefits that sharing with a smaller group might bring.
The World Wide Web as we think of it today (browsers accessing websites over HTTP) was still nascent.
SSL was only just announced 1 year earlier.
The first Kindle wouldn't show up until 12 years after.
And until the COVID pandemic most of the world still would have thought we weren't ready to effectively telecommunicate for work full time. (Arguably a lot of us still think that it's not sustainable long-term)
Meanwhile, the late 90's were full of big dreams and exceedingly high expectations about what the Internet could be capable of, and the gap between expectations and reality is what contributed to the .com crash of the early 2000's
Meanwhile, meanwhile, on a key subject which is the nature of TRUST of information on the Internet, we've come full circle as the last 4 years have shown that more access to better information does not guarantee a better informed populace if powerful forces with an interest in manipulating others have access to powerful platforms like Facebook where they can target their misinformation to the most radicalizable group.
I would bet most people on this forum would not be able to predict accurately the next 25 years of technological progress, and if we tried, most of us would look as ridiculous as Cliff Stoll. His mistake was saying everything with as much certainty as he did.
"This is how we live now."
Malls made town centers decay, sometimes even disappear. Towns definitely lost their uniqueness as pretty much every mall is the same.
I love the internet and how it allows anyone to do almost anything without leaving home... but at the same time, I hope that spaces where people go to physically interact do not ever disappear (at least while we're confined to a physical, biological body, that is).
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
25 years ago. Wow.
That being too close to reality for comfort, I have removed it like some coward who doesn't enjoy being obviously wrong.
Oops.
> 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.
Also oops.
> Also oops.
As far as I know, the use of computers in the classroom is still an unsolved problem let alone all teachers knowing how to do it.
>> Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.
And thus there is no problem in closing schools for months because of COVID-19? Watching recorded lectures and filling in multiple-choice forms does not cut it.
He did not have the vision to understand that technology would progress ... for example, beyond the lame experience of reading a book on a giant CRT monitor into a magical experience where I can read any book ever published, instantly, and in the dark next to my wife while she sleeps.