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

Uh...

[nougatmachine]

Geez, someone needs to tell these guys about blogs. A few quick trips to Memepool and BoingBoing should be enough to convince anyone that the web is still a pretty eclectic and loony place to be.

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".

Here's a quote I've been saving

[unitron]

In an article about Gator.com from a couple of weeks ago, Gator's Scott Eagle said "The promise of the Internet was always one-to-one marketing...", but I'll bet he doesn't have a notorized piece of paper anywhere that starts out "I hereby promise..." and winds up saying "...signed, The Internet", and neither does anybody else.

People keep saying "The Internet is supposed to be..." and then they fill in the blank with whatever they think most benefits them, and then whine when it turns out to be nothing more or less than a de-centralized network of networks instead of whatever miracle machine to which they personally feel somehow divinely entitled.

they've got it all wrong

[The Mayor]

The Internet promised to be the next generation platform for pornography and piracy. I can remember back in the mid-80s being able to download porn images (er...I mean a good friend told me they remember...). The Internet certainly has delivered on these promises.

I'd love to see a breakdown of total Internet bandwidth allocated to porn and piracy. I'd bet it consumes >90% of the total bandwidth used. Movies, music, and babes...now, if only they could figure out a way to download alcohol and drugs.

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

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.