Re:Why I Hate the Internet (1995)
by mechanical_fish on Thursday April 16, 2009 @01:06PM
(#565435)
It's amusing to read this after fourteen years.
Yes, the Internet is not free. But neither is high-fructose corn syrup. What HFCS is, is cheap. And the Internet keeps getting cheaper. The old argument seen here -- that the Internet will just be a plaything for the rich -- gets less relevant every day.
Back in 1995 only geeks knew that the Internet was an amazing social tool. That's how it was possible for this writer to claim that "friends, gym or art class, school clubs or teams, driver's ed., or other such aspects of high school life... could never be delivered direct-to-you through the internet". Gym class is hard to deliver via TCP/IP (alas for our waistlines) as is driver's ed -- but friends, clubs, teams, and art class turn out to be lots of fun online. And the author falls for the common fallacy of either/or, familiar from such classic stupid debates as "nature vs nurture": Either you have an online life or you have an offline life. The notion that these two things might evolve to augment each other was impossible for this writer to grasp in 1995.
As for the final point:
information posted on the internet has virtually no proof of reliability
That could have been written yesterday. People are still fighting through this canard. As if the folks who could afford printing presses, radio transmitters, or TV sets have always been trustworthy.
As time goes on, we see ever more clearly that the mandarins of older media use the word reliable the way European missionaries used the world Christian and the ancient Romans used the word civilized: As a disguised synonym for "respectful of the established authorities that I serve".
Yes, the Internet is not free. But neither is high-fructose corn syrup. What HFCS is, is cheap. And the Internet keeps getting cheaper. The old argument seen here -- that the Internet will just be a plaything for the rich -- gets less relevant every day.
Back in 1995 only geeks knew that the Internet was an amazing social tool. That's how it was possible for this writer to claim that "friends, gym or art class, school clubs or teams, driver's ed., or other such aspects of high school life... could never be delivered direct-to-you through the internet". Gym class is hard to deliver via TCP/IP (alas for our waistlines) as is driver's ed -- but friends, clubs, teams, and art class turn out to be lots of fun online. And the author falls for the common fallacy of either/or, familiar from such classic stupid debates as "nature vs nurture": Either you have an online life or you have an offline life. The notion that these two things might evolve to augment each other was impossible for this writer to grasp in 1995.
As for the final point:
information posted on the internet has virtually no proof of reliability
That could have been written yesterday. People are still fighting through this canard. As if the folks who could afford printing presses, radio transmitters, or TV sets have always been trustworthy.
As time goes on, we see ever more clearly that the mandarins of older media use the word reliable the way European missionaries used the world Christian and the ancient Romans used the word civilized: As a disguised synonym for "respectful of the established authorities that I serve".