Web No Longer Eclectic?

khog writes: "The Sunday New York Times had a front-page article entitled, "Exploration of World Wide Web Tilts From Eclectic to Mundane." The article says that "[t]he Web was supposed to subvert corporate domination of culture by giving a global soapbox -- or printing press, or television station -- to anyone with a computer and a modem" and takes off from there. Was the Web ever "supposed to be" anything, much less a subversion of "corporate domination of culture?" Isn't the reduction of idle surfing and the increase of a "more direct, predetermined approach to the Web" just a "reflection" of an educated user base that knows what it wants?"

Comments

a good thing!

[bcrowell]

When you want a particular piece of information, it's bad to have to slog through dozens of crappy personal Geocities sites that say "under construction," or commercial sites that give you popups and gratuitous java applets and flash animations.

The great thing about Google and Open Directory is that you can usually find what you want without pain.

I don't see how any of this undercuts the personal-freedom aspect of the web. A lot of the starred "cool" sites that Open Directory steers you to are personal sites.

When the television was first invented

[Glowing Fish]

When the television was first invented, people would turn it on just to see the snow, if their was no singal to pick up. Just using the technology was a thrill in itself.

I think the web was the same way. When people first got access to it, it was fun to investigate the web page that had pictures of all one hundred My Little Pony's, just because clicking was fun, and also just to see whether or not something that specialized really existed.

Of course, when novelty dies down, people are going to use things for what they need, not just to see "if they can".

Supposed to be something?

[jcr]

Sure it was. When I first saw the web, it was supposed to be a way to hyperlink citations in physics papers.

I still have that browser somewhere on one of my NeXT machines. It's hard-wired to look for its start page at a machine at CERN that doesn't exist anymore, though.

-jcr

Re:Here's a quote I've been saving

[dgroskind]

The Internet is supposed to be...

• TO EMPOWER K-12 LEARNERS
  
• the promise of our future
  
• to save the American medical system
  
• a global, multipurpose, multimedia communications network
  
• to strengthen Hispanic families and communities
  
• to open the door for competition
  
• for English as a Second Language
  
• for freedom from sysadmin
  
• to transfer the power of the high-speed network effectively to society at large
  
• to compete successfully with Fortune 500 companies
  
• To center learning around the student instead of the classroom
  
• to regain the tails of the normal distribution
  
• to test the founding vision of the framers of the Constitution
  
• to propel the economy forward
  
• a truly democratic means of communication.
  
• to increase mail usage and expand paper consumption
  

Intelligent People

[nerdin]

I've been working with it since early nineties, and my older son began to read on screen before than on paper.
He's now 13. A quote from him, six months ago:

"Internet is no longer carried out by intelligent people. Now it looks too much like TV".

'nuff said.