The Net Revolution's Backlash

In some ways, the Net Revolution, like most others, is a sad and strange story to be told: one of almost unbelievable and rapid change, excitement, opportunity and disappointment. It's also a story of a great backlash, growing doubts, and broken promises. Technologically, the network has proved to be one of the fastest growing phenomena in the history of invention. But politically and socially, few of the early hopes for it have materialized, and the counterattack is underway. Is the Net Revolution out of touch with human beings? Second of a series. (Read more).

We don't have a paperless world; work isn't easier, or even demonstrably more efficient; nation-states are not disintegrating; the new global economy hasn't improved the lot of the vast majority of the world's population; new software has nearly destroyed the notion of privacy; our citizens or political leaders haven't been reenergized by the sweeping possibilities of e-democracy. Our new President says the Net can turn children's hearts "dark" and murderous, and Amazon has yet to make a buck.

People can communicate, transfer information, make airline reservations, place auction bids, plunge into sophisticated games, hack any system on the planet, create alternate personalities, self-publish themselves, yak with their grandkids and amass tons of free stuff from music to lecture notes to building blueprints.

A seminal promise of the Computer Revolution -- for many, the point -- was to bring information to everybody and make lives easier. But is this the revolution? Does this really change life for the better, or even change it much at all? A few years ago, the idea of the Net -- its freedom and openness, its ethos of sharing information -- seemed stunning, radical. But they don't seem very revolutionary at the moment. In fact, the reconsideration and doubts -- a slowdown, a backlash -- are upon us.

Consider Napster, perhaps the Net's most popular single application and favorite media symbol. An entity that drew 62 million people in just two years -- a perhaps unprecedented accomplishment in business history -- is fighting to exist at all.

Napster's crippling can't be read as anything but a portent of what's to come. File-sharing is by no means shut down, but the bad guys have won one of the first great wars between corporatism and free information advocates, and the victory has handed them a substantial legal precedent.

So the Net is no closer than it was several years ago to finding a workable model for distributing culture fairly, legally and rationally; in fact, that goal seems even further off.

Napster probably means far less in practical terms than its media attention indicates, but it's a handy metaphor for this transition from one era to another, with the attendant confusion, turmoil and promise. Napster's series of defeats suggests that the grown-ups are finally taking charge, that the wild frontier is closing down.

The Net and the Web have revolutionized certain areas like academic and scientific research. But they've done little to eradicate illiteracy or poverty, or alter education for most students. The search for virtual community remains ephemeral. The Digital Nation has not emerged to create a new kind of rational, meaningful democracy. In fact, the latest innovations in software are complex filtering, blocking and moderation systems that permit people to pre-select the ideas and informatiion they're willing to receive. This is not what Jefferson had in mind.

There are plentiful examples of the way the Net can empower individuals -- in particular by providing access to information previously unavailable or prohibitively expensive. People have access to all kinds of medical, legal and other information previously sold and closed off to them, and to new avenues of expression from webpages to mailing lists to MUD's. .

The Net has given small entrepeneurs, threatened by the Wal-Marting of the country, a new opportunity to prosper. And it's creating countless smaller gathering spots for micro-communities in need of contact with one another -- the sick, the elderly, hobbyists, professionals, movielovers, gays.

Meanwhile, however, the computer industry, the heart and soul of this supposed revolution, is paying the price for years of arrogance, of confusing and overpriced products, of lousy customer service, of unfulfilled promises. All these have fueled the public perception that the people involved in creating the computer revolution are callous and greedy, that they can't really be trusted to create a computer network that people will be able to use readily and benefit from.

In fact, one of the striking characteristics of this revolution is the sense that the people making it have failed to keep in mind, communicate with or connect to the people using it, and upon whom their future ultimately depends.

More backlash: Retailers, distributors and other commercial midde-men have launched a broad assault, waging a quiet but successful campaign to block e-commerce. Car dealers, wine merchants and music merchants are lobbying for laws to shut down online rivals. Internet lawyers, almost nonexistent just a decade ago, are firmly entrenched in today's cyberspace, whether you see them as partners or villains.

A new report (not yet online) from Washington think tank the Progressive Policy Institute catalogs how pervasive the rush for protection has become. It notes that in l997, Texas optometrists lobbied successfully for a law requiring out-of-state contact lens providers to obtain original, hand-signed prescriptions before shipping lenses to customers. The law makes ordering via the Web, which generated half of 1-800-Contacts' estimated $145 million in sales last year, much more time-consuming.

There is an Internet Predicament, Newsweek's Robert Samuelson wrote last month: the Net is a great giveaway, but not yet a great business, because there is simply too much distributed for free or priced below cost. Online sales of goods are still a tiny fraction of retails sales; what has really thrived online is information, something tricky to charge for.

In fact, information has driven so much of the so-called tech boom that consumers are becoming overwhelmed by data -- even blessed endeavors like Disney's Go.com have found themselves one more dot on a crowded graph.

There is also a failure of community. Early cyber-models like San Francisco's WELL have turned out to be isolated examples of virtual community, not really a harbinger of things to come.

Naturally, questions and doubts about the revolution are not far behind.

In The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid worry about losing the value of face-to-face personal and office encounters. Stories told around the water cooler are critical to businesses and institutions, they write, offering nuance, cues and personal connections that are essential in real communications, but which are sometimes lost online.

Narration, they write, is a key, if unexpected tool for workers or employers. "The constant storytelling -- about problems and solutions, about disasters and triumphs, over breakfast, lunch and coffee -- serves a number of overlapping purposes," say the authors. These purposes are often poorly served via e-mail, IRC or instant messaging.

Among the calls for change is The Unfinished Revolution, a new book from MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos. Looking at the rate at which technology and its attendant devices are taking us over, he laments, "We wait endlessly for our computers to boot up, and for bulky Web pages to paint themselves on our screens. We stand perplexed in front of incomprehensible system messages, and wait in frustration on the phone for computerized assistance. We constantly add software upgrades, enter odd instructions, fix glitches, only to sit in maddening silence when our machines crash, forcing us to start all over again, hoping against hope that they didn't take a piece of our intellectual hide with them."

And it's going to get worse, Dertouzo argues. If the quirky machines give us grief now, imagine the message we'll get when there are 10 times as many of these "creatures biting at you."

We need reform, Dertouzos says, a new plan for "human-centric computing" that will serve, not frustrate people, and work as well for the non-tech world as for the tech universe.

The idea of human-centric computing makes sense, though it does have a familiar ring. Haven't we heard such promises before? Computers were supposed to have surpassed humans in cognitive thinking long before now. But that's only one of the unkept promises of a revolution that has already made too many, and that's proved less than revolutionary.

Next: Broken Promises, Failed Expectations. Has the public lost faith?

Comments

Out of touch with human beings?

[gowen]

How can the net be out of touch with human beings?
Every decision thats being made is being made by human beings, for human beings. Is it out of touch with some ill defined utopia that makes Katz feel all fuzzy inside, certainly, but that should not be mistaken for what humanity is.

If the net is cold, alienating, money obsessed, balkanized and uninviting it is because it reflects humanity all too well.

Yawn.

[deefer]

Content, please?

Katz once again has believed the market hype of the media whores who pushed the whole "internet will change all our lives".

Look at all the good things on the internet today - you can share files, you can seek tech help, you can waste time on weblogs... You can buy a holiday, you can research a car spec, all these things are good and possible.

What is evil about the internet? Kiddie pr0n, corporations subverting open standards, and marketing. Without marketing there wouldn't be 35 spam messages sitting in my inbox. Without marketing we wouldn't have had the boom bust dotcom era.
The meltdown in dotcom stocks is a symptom of how marketing and PR are destroying everything that's is good in the world, and not just on the net. Why do people get killed for their Nikes? Because the killers saw the marketing and *had* to have the trainers.

The fact of the matter is the Internet has improved my life. It's easy to download latest patches & drivers and look for help when I'm at work. I can plan evenings out with my friends over email, or offer them sympathy if they're down. I can track down hard to find books. Small things, but my life is arguably better than pre internet days.
What the marketers saw was communities like the WELL and thought that was for everybody. The thing about places like that is that they attract a similar kind of people, where these people can then found communities.

Most of the more cohesive communities online that I belong to are tech based. I think this is because us techs resent the way the internet has turned out and look for our own little oasis, free from the lusers that infest the net today. These communities are the envy of the media luvvies who push the net-chages-everything argument, because the media people are now realising that you can't build it - it must be allowed to grow. And most lusers aren't willing to go through that curve.

In short, as ntk.net says - "They stole our revolution. Now we're stealing it back".

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

Katz forgets what life was like before the web

[Illserve]

When I want to find out a piece of mundane information, no matter what it is, 99 times out of 100 I'll be able to find it quickly and easily on the web somewhere. Scroll back 15 years, and what was I doing? going through a card catalog at a library, or hitting an encyclopedia.

Now I'm not saying books have lost their place. One of the dangers is the net is people paying less attention to our paper legacy. But the amount of information on the web is staggering, and it actually isn't all that hard to find what you want, be it a snippet of MATLAB code to do wavelet transforms, a list of roman emporers, or names and reviews of all of Peter Jackson's films. It's in your face in 1-3 minutes. That kind of information turnaround was unthinkable 15 years ago, and its effect on my productivity is profound.

Now the net can hamper productivity as well, by providing easy distractions. But there's only person for me to blame when I allow myself to waste time. I don't blame the automotive industry if I hurt myself in a car wreck.

I think Katz is too cynically dismissive of the positive changes that have occurred as a result of the internet.

Change has no timeline

[Badgerman]

The futue isn't kept on a Microsoft Project chart. There's no "must" no "have to" about change. God didn't post a plan saying when specific technological and social changes must occur.

So things didn't turn out like some of us expected? That's normal. Things aren't what we wanted out of the technology boom? Learn your lessons and move on.

Forget "had to", "must have", "should", and "didn't". The future is what we make it. Sitting around waiting for something miraculous to happen because of some ephemeral predictions is ridiculous. Complaining things didn't turn out like we want doesn't fix problems.

Too many people expected the Internet Revolution to happen to them - but that they didn't have to participate actively. Well, a Revolution needs Revolutionaries - so if you want changes, get off your backside and make them.