Unpredictable Nature of Technology

Recently, lots of sites started pointing out a very old article that was published in Newsweek in 1995. Titled “The Internet? Bah!”, the author, Clifford Stoll, explained why he felt the Internet would never live up to its hype.

So how accurate were his predictions?

Stoll felt that the global bulletin boards that the Internet promised where anyone could post their views “leapfrogging editors and publishers” would only result in cacophony. His point was that if everyone was busy voicing (shouting?) their opinion, who was doing the listening? What did happen was that people started posting comments and responses to published articles. And even their opinions via blog sites. And people posted comments below those as well. If that isn’t reading and listening, what is?

He also predicted that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper”. Now that one he got totally wrong. People just decided to read the information for free online rather than pay for the printed edition!

Stoll also felt electronic publishing would never get popular due to the unpleasantness of reading a book on a screen. Plus, the impracticality of carrying a laptop everywhere you went. While both reasons are indeed true, technology has since evolved to come up with lighter, smaller, dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle.

At the time he wrote the article, it was painfully difficult to find anything on the Web. If people can’t search through the vast information easily, why would they use the Internet? Along came Google. And suddenly searching was a piece of cake.

Stoll also felt that the expected impact of the Internet on governance was exaggerated. While it certainly hasn’t changed governance drastically, remember the impact of Twitter in Iran recently? Or the amount of feedback Obama got via the Internet during his campaign?

Stoll felt the impact of the Internet on education was over-hyped. That “no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher”. On that point, he was right. No software or multi-media has replaced good teachers. But availability of information has gone through the roof. Sites like Wikipedia, How Stuff Works and TED talks provide a whole new category of information for everyone. No longer are people constrained by the encyclopedias they can afford or what their nearest library stocks. Or worse, limited copies of those books!

Another one he got completely wrong was the success of e-commerce. Online purchases happen all the time. How many of us today buy railway tickets any way other than online? Most of us have bought something or the other via Rediff or Sify. And it’s not just businesses that sell online. Even individuals buy and sell online (think eBay).

Stoll’s final criticism of the Internet was that it lacked human contact. But look what happened. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have exploded. Everybody corresponds through e-mail. People even conduct or attend classes via video feeds today. And post personal videos at YouTube.

While it’s easy to point at someone’s predictions that were wrong with the benefit of hindsight, it’s revealing to see why he got it so totally wrong. And the “why” had all got to do with the speed with which technology evolved. Fiber optic cables became so plentiful that broadband prices fell through the floor. This in turn brought more people online. It also became possible to put up visually appealing pages and videos on web sites. Meanwhile, PC and laptops’ prices fell so sharply that even more people could buy them. And once there were enough people on the Net, businesses just had to be online. And social networking sites and mail sites came up to find and connect people online. Google then made finding things so easy that everyone had to come online to access the vast information available. All of these things happened within 10-12 years of the article being published. That’s just the speed at which technology evolves today. It’s simply not possible for anyone to predict how things will be a year from now.

Guess where I found the article? Not at a library or at a friend’s who had stashed old copies of the magazine. I found it on the Internet. Now, isn’t that ironical?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more