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Heart of the Net
The Net has evolved, and radically. It's much too big and diverse for a single locus. It's also much too corporatized, and its new kinds of messaging systems increasingly too personalized and subterranean. Unless you're selling things via AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace. The new media sites are all struggling; Wired has become a homogenized bulletin board for computer execs; and the most successful and heavily trafficked sites are about products, games or entertainment.
Since the Net has always been an almost organic, free-form entity -- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over. For a while, the heartbeat resided in the dream of new kinds of virtual and media communities -- the WELL, ECHO, Salon, Slate -- that popped up to connect people of common cultural or political interests. They were supposed to herald the movement of traditional media online. They were top-down, agenda-setting and, almost without exception, marginal or unsuccessful.
Enter AOL, then and now a Main Street for middle-class access. Its labyrinthine commercial sites, shameless peddling of goods, vast network of messaging boards and sex sites a form perfect metaphor for the evolution of the modern Internet -- people selling things like mad, and forming ever smaller, more specialized groups to talk to people much like themselves, with the same interests and ideals.
Of these developments, probably the early design era -- the Net's actual construction -- was its most idealistic. The early BBS's felt -- and were -- revolutionary, and few of the people first going online could help but feel they were participating in and witnessing the birth of a new kind of culture. Engineers and defense researchers like Postel, Licklider set out to build a free and open information network that would theoretically be open to and benefit everyone. Net architecture was certainly designed that way, and government, media and business paid little attention to the network, dismissing it as the handiwork of tech-heads and kids, irrelevant once the Cold War had passed.
The hacker period was the most revolutionary, and the open source phase one of the most political, especially when that movement rose to challenge the Microsofting of the desktop. The rise of the dot.coms might have been the most purely American era, in its speedy rise, greed and eventual collapse. Open source didn't stop the Microsofting of the Net, but it might have forced programmers to write better code, and greatly influenced the culture in other ways, creating a community of programmers committed to the idea of open access to information. And panicking corporate lobbyists into co-opting intellectual property legislation.
In between, enterprises like Amazon.com, which teased and tantalized investors and analysts with the retailing promise of networked computing, served as the heart of the Net, at least for a time, because they were so closely studied and monitored, and in some ways, highly innovative. For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
Napster, which freed millions of music lovers from the hoary grip of the recording industry, symbolized the Net's challenge to hierarchical business and institutional structures -- until it showed the true power of corporatists. For years, the hackers believed nobody could stop them. After the Napster battles, it was clear that lobbyists and lawmakers, especially conjunction with wealthy corporatists, could. Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods. Perhaps inevitably, this wasn't a fight the good guys ever really had a shot at winning, although they were slow to see it. While free music is still widely available online - free software types and music and movie traders are all over the place - the Net, it's now clear, will not remain a free frontier except in certain isolated and idiosyncratic corners.
The free software movement, in fact, was the apogee of the Net's most recent political period, the legacy to the hacker idea of liberating information, especially its sudden radical promise and challenge to proprietary institutions and information. For the hackers, the idea of an Open Net was their shining hour. Then the software turned communications inward, mostly permitting shoppers, chatters and people of like mind to talk to one another and shut out the clutter and the spam, including different points of view. At first, it was just religious fanatics and pious Boomers who embraced the idea of blocking and filtering. Then even hackers adopted it as a means of filtering out all that noise and an enormous volume of unwanted messiahs. The Net, designed to be the most open medium ever, became an increasingly closed nation of blockades, guardhouses and moderation and ratings systems. What the corporatists didn't sanitize, the hackers themselves chopped up.
An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good.
Where's the heart of the Net now?
The odd truth is that there probably isn't one.
The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network. It has grown beyond almost anybody's earliest imaginings to become a thoroughly mainstream and very American communications medium., thoroughly corporatized and Disnified. Its grown too diffuse to have a center. Half of the nation is now online, says the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly 90 percent of all kids.
AOL, a peculiar notion of the Net, is dominant -- with more than 25 million subscribers, it's probably the biggest single entity on the Net, at least in the U.S., and the largest host of utilitarian virtual communities. MSN is fast closing the gap. Who imagined just how prescient Steve Case really was, or how determined Bill Gates was? The middle-class wants to use the Net for pragmatic purposes -- shopping, entertainment, personal communications, and yes, sex. And they don't mind giving up privacy and freedom from corporate and government monitoring to do it.
This isn't meant to be a lament, not entirely. The Net was intended as an individualistic medium; it was inevitable that it would grow beyond a single focal point. Individualists still use it to chatter around the clock via mailing lists, blogs, vanity sites and IRC. But mostly, they appear to be speaking to ever smaller increments, like one another, rather to the larger world. The notion of the Net as a new kind of common ground is nearly over.
It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Few of them escape their immediate surroundings. The fragmentation, hostility and narcissism are equally jarring. The Net may never recover from the waves of hostile adolescents and intellectual programming crackers, like the DoS vandals -- often bitter enemies of free speech -- who thundered online in the 90s, nor from the corporatists who shaped and co-opted telecommunications policy, copyright and intellectual property law. The Net is perennially interesting, and in many ways its story is just beginning to unfold, but in a far subtler way. This culture is being transformed by its own success.
stop comparing the net to an organism, there is only so far you can take that analogy. It's just a medium of communication, there is no need to asign an epicenter to it and it porbably isn't even possible
You mean it isn't Slashdot?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Seriously, this is the best Jon Katz article I've read in a long time.
As an addendum to this, surely the liberation of Open Source Software forms the heart of a new net. In this post-September 11th, post-Columbine world, it is the geeks that shall lead the way.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Perhaps it was the largest "black market" for free goods, but it never really had the userbase the AOL or MSN has. It just wasn't around long enough. It could have, if the RIAA didn't step in and close it down.
However, it did have its own rather large community through it message boards where the dialog between pro-Napster and pro copyright forces was conducted. In its last incarnation, ran a modified form of Slash.
This is the most subjective drivel I've read (skip-read, actually) in ages.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
I don't think that there's a real center of the net, but there are "groupings" around the net where the servers/sites/computers/people/whateveryouwant are more concentrated!
Life sucks.
But I'll give you a hint, "There Is No Cabal."
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
So what you're saying is that the heart of the net is whatever part of it the media decides to glom onto that week?
I hate to tell you this Jon, but "hackers in suburban bedrooms" are still just as prevalent as the Wired CEO of the Week, as are many, many dotcom companies that are actually making money.
The heart of the net is pure ones and zeroes. It has nothing to do with what aspects of it the Washington Post and Wired decide to pay attention to.
What did I miss back in the mid-90's? I always thought Wired was more like Vogue for the technology set -- candy-coated fluff without much substance.
Anyone have an issue of the magazine this guy's talking about? :)
Method of processing duck feet
It seems to me that now days the Net is so big and there is so many persons hanging around that now is more like a country, for some people the Net Heart is the multimedia sharing community, for others the porn post sites, for others the chatrooms, others Quake or Counter Strike, AI, development, Open Source, jokes and many other topics... i know persons who spend 90% of their online time playing Quake, more or like 4-5 hours a day, same goes for mp3 downloaders and developers.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Can we ALSO please stop comparing the Net to orgasm. Seriously. Everybody seems to have this hard-on for the Net and the technological utopia it will bring us. Teslatug is right. It's MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION. It's not Christ. It's a tool for accomplishing a variety of tasks. What we do with it in the next 50 years will be a big deal. But anyway you slice it, the Net is a means to an ends.
Why bother.
You haven't the slightest clue.
errr .. last i checked .. Microsoft was the heart of .NET(tm)
.. if so .. then [being an American myself] I suggest you try looking outside the borders of our country .. 90% of the web's BullShit not only concerns only the U.S. .. but it happens in our borders.
.. this could be because you still pay per min when using a phone over there.
unless your talking about the World Wide Web
Both the U.K. and Europe in general have a great deal more of an 'information' presence.
of course
Kats, Kats, Who Let the Katz out ?
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
The heart of the net is money, just like everything else in the world.
Businesses want to woo customers, customers want to find free/cheap information and products. Drill down anything on the net and you arrive at money changing hands. Perhaps 1% of the net is true selfless volunteering for the greater good, but even that has its alterior motives (fame, pride, power, etc)
------
Today's Top Deals
I live in Brazil, where AOL tried to enter the market but loses constantly to national ISPs. We here have many free ISPs and also some who charges money but offers a lot of content.
I believe the future of the Net will still be created by us: engineers, developers, programmers, system and network administrators. We are the Internet power. Our communities and associations with scientific and open spirits are the only way to mantain and establish open standards and open source softwares who can keep the Net and all its infrastructure alive. Without us the corporatists are nothing more than crying babies and the machines will simply stop!
Thank you all.
Jose Paulo Papo, from Brazil
"Learning, learning, learning - that is the secret of jewish survival" -- Ahad A'Ham
The net has many hearts; that's where its beauty lies. It has a pulse, sure, but that pulse is derived from countless sources... limiting it to a single flavor-of-the-month source is rather short-sighted.
"Joan of Arc, up top!" - Ghandi, Clone High
To find it you must be able to measure it. One possibility is that we could measure the source of the most packets, perhaps there is a nexus out there.
Another possibility is that we could measure the content out there, perhaps there is a nexus of content.
But methinks to the extent the net reflects the interaction of people, there is no center, there is no heart, just the beat of fingers on keyboards...
The hearts of the net are the routers.
---
Oregon
The net, and the way it 'lives', reacts, etc., is much more like that of the real world we live in. If there is some central being, entity, thingy, processor, then it is decidedly different for each person acting on the net (kind of like religion). It's just a bunch of electronic patterns but who's to say that we aren't much more than that since that's how the brain works. I don't think there is a definitive answer for this but that's what makes the conversation interesting; learning from others and expanding our own thoughts.
It's Melony, and she wants me to see her live now on webcam.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Please.
This fits just nicely into the category of stories that have been posted recently. First, His Royal Hypocrit RMS, a lot of bullshit about licenses and now this rant.
There is nothing like a golden era of the net. You just remember a period of relative peace, stability and comfort in which you accidentally stumbled on the internet and decided to spend some time with it. The internet is exciting NOW, and you are living in the present. Stop whining about the good old days.
Don't overemphasize. Check your reality.
no sig error.
That's a good thing, I think. The net is mapping to the world at large, not the exclusive domain of the cogniscenti, or the young or the hardcore geeks.
All of those communities can find places to thrive and even to interact, but they will do so in the company of other communities using the web in ways that suit them.
It's a wonderful grown-up kind of thing.
JonKatz, you are an idiot. Please stop posting your endless drivel about your opinion of the day. This "heart of the net" crap is as pointless as any of your ramblings. The internet was designed from day one to have NO HEART, only endless interconnections, yet you bring up such a childish topic as this. Please come up with something insightful to write, or just let the users post more articles.
~ now you know
The "Net" Isn't alive. The "Net" will never be alive. There is no heart of the net, as it's constantly changing by the input of countless of people. AOL is a provider, not the heart. BBS's were not even on the net, for as the name implies (Net) they would of have to of been interconnected, and that was not usually the case. Microsofting of the net?.. care to explain that? Sure they're a huge monopoly, but i don't see any part of the "Net" carved out for them. Only some servers running their code. Opensourcing is a reasonable outcome of interconnecting everyone together. I don't believe it's motives were purely political. There have been many collaberations going on before anyone mentioned anything about gpling their stuff.
All in all, the net is just a tool. Nothing more. To try and look at it in a different light is a waste of time.
If there's a heart of the Net, it's Google.
Without Google, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as useful for me.
If you cut through the hype and punditry that Mr. Katz is so fond of, and you just look at traffic patterns (i.e., top search engine queries, Usenet posts, credit card transactions, etc.), a plausible case can be made that pornography is the "heart of the net".
Of course, even Jon acknowledges the fallacy of looking for a "heart" in a decentralized system with this sentence in his opening paragraph:
I submit that the "net" has no heart. Instead, it has millions of sweaty crotches.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Even with all of the "guard houses" and "blockades", the internet is still a very
open forum, and it's one that I don't
want to see restricted/wrecked in any way.
we do not need bozos to try to charge people
pr packet sent. We don't need the gov't or
any large corperation to put restrictions or
even go so far as to require a license for it
(remember the DS9 episode where Bashir and
Sisco went back to 21st century earth and the
poor were locked away in ghettos called "sanctuary
disctricts") and we certainly don't need any
corperations to try and turn the
net into a vast, closed proprietary system
tightly controlled by a few people. Even with
it's weaknesses, the net is fine just as it is,
and we should work to make it a more robust,
but still very open system
Katz says: "An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good. "
Tell that to anyone on usenet, freely sending email to each other, IRC, anyone still using nTalk, there are loads of ways still to freely use the net openly.
Is it just me, or is this just anti-commercialism being beaten-up, and presented here because it goes with the reputation of this site? Katz, if I can give you any hint for your writing, try not to be so emotional and vague. It just looks evasive and manipulative, like you dont have a real point to get across and are writing for the sake of a post.
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
Probably a yankee...
http://www.esquilax.com/flag/burn7.html
This is the sad truth.
The net became popular for all the wrong reasons. As jon puts it, AOL shameless peddles it's goods and sex. AOL also markets it's servies twoard WinME using adolecents.
The problem here is that the populace views the internet as a way to buy books, talk to friends, send e-mails, and of course... view porn. This is not what the internet was created for. The internet was created as a means of communication and sharing of information. In this aspect, it has succeeded. E-mail is quickly replacing faxes for information transmission; universities publish their studies on the net; news sites keep people informed of the latest happenings, etc, ad infinitium.
Despite it's successes, these resources are generally untapped. The average Joe InternetUser will never view any content outside of aol's proprietary network, and will most likey end up buying an encyclopedia with 3 clicks of the mouse.
The internet will not revolutionize shopping. People have been able to order goods through the mail (and later by phone) from establishments such as sears for over 75 years. Nothing revolutionary here. The net does, however provide a medium to provide more information about the products sold through these means.
Now, for a small rant on html. html should have died years ago. all html was intended for was as a means to format text and link documents to one another. innocent enough, this was what the original intent of the net was anyway... share information. Then e-commerce developed, perl was invented, etc. A more interactive medium should have taken over. Rebol is a great example of one such format, as it improves functionality tenfold, while keeping bandwidth at a minimum.
Take this as a lesson. Small groups of people working out of the goodness of their heart make the net a better place. Big corporations do not.
Well said jon... it's the sad truth
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Why is it so odd that, as the Net becomes increasingly ubiquitous, it ceases to have a well-defined "heart".
The premise of this article is like asking where the heart of the library is - the periodicals? the dictionary? The Grapes of Wrath? Or how about the heart of the phone book? The yellow pages? The residential listings? 867-5309?
The not-so-odd truth is that the internet is a medium, not a message, and therefore its heart depends on the perspective of the user.
Oh yeah, and all that stuff about AOL - just because there are more of "them" doesn't make them more (or less) relevant. Remember, for every human being on earth there are thousands of pounds of insects!
At any one point in time some-one is having their "good old days". I find it droll that we have to hear this refection every time somebody feels theirs have passed them by... Honestly, are corporations really ruining the Net? Were BBS's really better? Oh, there's soooo much pr0n out there (anyone remember text art pr0n?). As sad as it may be, this is what people want, otherwise these things would have died away. The net is still capitalism at the purest we can have. It's true that the stakes have risen, but so has quality. This horrible argument can be likened to saying the world was better with the horse instead of the car. I don't know about you guys, but I don't know of one horse that can do 70 mph and comes with a heater!.
This is not a terrible loss of Internet 'heart', but evolution. Things change.
Never trust a bald barber; he has no respect for your hair
that it has no top-down imposed heart, epicenter, or focal point. This is pull tech, whether you're talking web, usenet, or whatever. And when it does become push, people become irate (Spam anyone?). So, if you define the heart as whatever former Wired lackeys say, then it changes on a weekly basis, or its absence is lamented. If, however, you use the myriad abilities of the net daily, you know where its heart is, and not surprisingly, its close to your own.
There are lots of different people on the Internet. Those people use it for the things they are interested in.
Some people use it for sex.
I wish I could mod down JonKatz: Offtopic, Redundant and Stupid.
The Anti-Blog
Various governments across the world are trying to grasp the Internet for monitoring and tracking purposes. If anything I would say that the government is now the heart of the net. Carnivore and other "freedom endorsing" tools seem to be more widespread by the day if one is to take the trend on Slashdot seriously.
Not only is the government afraid of the anarchy of the Internet, but it is also realizing that it is a great way to keep tabs on what its citizens are doing, since more people spend more and more time online. Wrap it all up in a FUD package about hackers and terrorists and the deal is done.
But I don't think the question should be what the "heart" is today. I think the more interesting question is where it will be tomorrow. Is the monitoring going to become more widespread and controversial and ultimately handed off to private organizations? Perhaps a new government subsidised monopoly may emerge? Who knows?
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Any analysis of the zeitgeist of the web that does not mention Matt Drudge is missing a large part of what the web is about.
Love him or hate him, he has been the leading force in showing how the web can bypass entrenched hierachies (the news media) and provide products that they don't want us to have.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
The heart of the net is webcams. Like this wonderful Web Page Cam
this article reminds me of exactly why i stopped reading wired several years ago: it's sensationalist fluff.
a) the "gurus of wired" never did anything but write pie-in-the-sky articles about the "new economy", as if infotech somehow freed the human race from manufacturing, farming, etc (a decidedly first-world conceit). if it wasn't that specious line of reasoning, then it was silly futurist articles about how technology was going to either make everyone into a superhuman cyborg or alternately turn the planet into a william gibson novel gone wrong. i give wired props for graphic design, but not much else. read it in an airport when you're bored, but if you want science news, read a science journal.
b) all of this eulogizing is a bit premature. the hacker period is not over. people are still hacking away, in fact, i'd bet that the number of people writing free software is larger now than in your idealized hacker period. it's just not big sexy news anymore. shut up and let people work.
c) before you get all misty-eyed (too late, i know), the "heart of the NET" was the u.s. military. i'm much happier with the heart of the net being porn sites than some kind of post-apocalyptic military communications network. that seems like progress to me. if some gung-ho motherfuckers get our world blown-up, the last thing i want them to be able to do is get together and talk about it afterwords.
Slashdot News Flash - Katz STILL has nothing interest or substance to say.
Centre of the net? Bulls**t. The whole point of the net is that it IS decentralised and anarchistic. There has never really been a centre - but there are clusters. The groups and communities that he mentions as 'having had their time', etc all still exist and contribute to the experience that is otherwise known as the Internet, for better or (in AOL's case) for the worst
The Media's focus on what is hot might have changed, but so what? Media attention is the most fickle of creatures. I never understood the anti-Katz sentiment on Slash as I never bothered reading his articles, but now that I have I can't think why he is given such bandwidth!
Mod me down as a troll or flamebait, but I dare someone to point me to a link with a Katz article which actually has any useful or genuinely though provoking information about technology and culture!
I can't help thinking that the heart of the net is not "gone", but instead broadened. Whereas in the past it reflected one sub-set of American culture (usually a subset of the "techie" subset)now it has broadened to encompass most of American culture, good and bad. While Europe, the East, and Africa continue to provide good contributions, the Net (like movie and TV) have continued the evangelization of the world. The Net is uniquely american in its ideas of freedom and equality and capitalism, no matter where it is.
Sorry, but we're not gonna tell ya - RTFM. ;-)
Porn.
WebTool ODK 6.9 has a constantly refreshed "net center" image on their Web Tool site. Download a copy here.
thank you
Emmanuel Goldstein
Chief Engineer
ODK Labs
I have a name for those "Wired magazine visionaries and gurus". I call them Latte Drinkers. (Yes, the reference to Quiche Eaters is entirely intentional.) Latte Drinkers like to pontificate about that which they don't understand. They are bogon emitters. They latch onto the cultures they find on the net, parasitize them, and generate hype about technology they can't be arsed to learn about. They may be largely responsible for the tech bubble of the late nineties. Of course they won't fade away as the bubble collapses; they'll just find something new to latch onto. But they're still around. Case in point, the author of the above article exhibits Latte Drinker behavior to such a degree that it's a wonder he's still kept around on a "news for nerds" site. Go figure.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Because they are filled with emotions!
/. readers are male, and technically
The majority of
adept at that.
It takes effort to sit down and see the world from
someone else's point of view, specially when that
PoV is not an argubale fact, but an emotion.
mark me down to -1 for being off topic, and next
time you see a Katz article, pass it to a female
friend, a non technical (immaginative male.)
or anyone with human blood running through their
veins, as opposed to a lethal mixture of caffeine
and testestrone, and you will see them enjoy it.
I prefer porn, but this is funny as hell!
I see little of interest in this post. Beyond a brief and difficult-to-follow history of modern events involving the internet, there seems to be little form or substance to this article. No interesting questions are asked, no thought provoking assertions are made. Essentially, it's little more than a description of how JonKatz perceives the internet, and to be honest, it's a dull description. I expected at least something worthy of discussion. Jon, simply look at the replies you've generated. There's nothing to discuss here. If you want people to respect you as a columnist, you have to give them something to talk about. Something that hasn't been said before a thousand times in your other columns. A vague sound bite like "Heart of the Net" followed by a short and uninformative history is just verbal masturbation, no insult intended. Of course, I'm just an AC, and you're JonKatz, so you can take my opinion as you will. But I think that you'll find that you have to work harder if you want to impress the majority, instead of the minority who will receive you warmly simply because they enjoy dialogue, regardless of its content or vacuity.
How can something be both increasingly commercial and subterranean at the same time?
One pointless generalisation that we can make is that people less and less feel the need to pontificate on the direction of the 'net and are less entertained by Wired magazine "gurus" that do so.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
The heart of the net can be described as evolution.
The heart of the net is the beat..wait, no, that's rock'n'roll.
Why does everyone feel the need to summarize the net? You can't do it. It's just the big wonderful, horrible, informational, disgusting, collection of people, their thoughts, data, and lives.
Damn, I ask why everyone tries to summarize it, and then that's what I go and do. Shame on me. But then again, don't you Em Emalb me for everything anyway?
Sent from your iPad.
I believe is very hard to try and mark the center of the internet as a global thing. But i'm pretty sure everyone -in his mind- sees a global center on the internet. That undoubtely will vary from person to person, but in my mind i still see Yahoo! as the center. I dont know if anybody else here sees (or saw) Yahoo! as the "center" for "his" internet, for his representation of the internet, but i still ping for www.yahoo.com when i'm trying out a new internet connection.
well as usual i got bored after 2 paragraphs of katz. but if you failed to mention porn or gambling as being two epicenters of the net, then i think you are in need of serious reality check.
Is there anyway to shutup this guy? He's such a moron.
The 'net has no single "heart," any more than the world does. How could it?
Dear Mr. Katz:
You (/.) don't actually PAY Katz do you?
If so, i have some ocean front property in ohio i'd like to talk to you all about.
Yes, my girlfriend is a BitchX
This is just an atrocious article. If this was a contest to see how many quasi-technical buzzwords, and "old terms" you could throw into an article then I could possibly see a reason for someone writing this article.
If you're going to post an article talking about high and mighty ideals at least include some philosophical discussion around the subject. Don't just throw slop at us and expect us to eat it. If you're going to discuss something then discuss it. Don't post meaningless drivel about it. You attempt to take 10-20 years of history and chunk it into a page or two of text and then you expect to have something meaningful? Writing about how the Internet as a whole has evolved just this year could easily fill 10-20 pages of text.
If you're going to do something, do it right. These half-assed attempts at pretentiousness are a waste of valuable news space on the front page. If you want to wax philosophical about the evolution of electronics or the 'net, then do it properly.
- Stating that there are lots of different people on the Internet: 1 sentence.
- A Jon Katz essay saying the same thing: 1,000 words.
- Skipping yet another windbag editorial: priceless.
To make your point clearly there's concise writing, for everything else there's John Katz.My net's heart is /.
My aortic aneurysm is Katz...
hope this helps...
..how the internet has turned into the point-and-click-and-drool equivalent of television. The main hubs were always that, though they started out as lower-bandwidth versions of what they are now. Basically, the intelligence level of the net at large has gone down, way down.
:-]
There remain, however pockets of hope... and I think that Katz discounts these a little too easily.
Acadaemit networks and some virtual worlds like muds and moos still exist that form a vital and ever-changing community. A lot of them are still free, too
I think too of places like brunchma.com which are ever interesting and full of activity.
At the same time... I miss Salon's free days (though i do pay for it now). I miss the old FUCK list on attrition.org. I miss a lot of things.
But I'm not giving up on the net yet. It just has too much potential.
---------------
why man? I think you are cool.
-sinserve
I don't think so, or you'd stoped writing all this nonsense a long time ago.
let's take a look at some parts of your delusional ideas:
"The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network." : the internet _ALWAYS_ were an utilitarian network. The _MILITARY_ created and sponsored it in the 60's as a backup communication method to use in case of a nuclear war.
"Its grown too diffuse to have a center" : duh-uh. every large communication network becomes difuse whe it reaches global poportions. look the telephone system.
"For years, the hackers believed nobody could stop them. After the Napster battles, it was clear that lobbyists and lawmakers, especially conjunction with wealthy corporatists, could. Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods. Perhaps inevitably, this wasn't a fight the good guys ever really had a shot at winning, although they were slow to see it. While free music is still widely available online - free software types and music and movie traders are all over the place - the Net, it's now clear, will not remain a free frontier except in certain isolated and idiosyncratic corners." : They still do, in the same way that Bin Laden still believes he can win over US of A. They have an ideal and they'll fight for it with all the weapons they have. doesn't matter if they're wright or wrong, hackers/terrorist/eco activists, etc are usually fanatics for what they're doing
the napster era IS NOT over. what you call "napster era" I call "peer-to-peer era". napster made the concept of p2p file sharing popular. if the software or the company is no-more there's others to fill the gap, and these ones goes titsup.com new ones will come. this is a fight _THE RECORDING INDUSTRY_ can't win.
I could go over and over, but I'm tired of this. Katz simply doesn't have a clue.
What ? Me, worry ?
Heart = www.yahoo.com
Lungs = www.google.com
Kidneys = www.blogger.com
Pancreas = www.slashdot.org
Large Intestines = www.aol.com
Small Intestines = www.msn.com
Brain = still under development
hope this helps...
As you can see from the comments, those who weren't there to actually CREATE the WWW as we know it, have the most to say as to what it should be to their pimply-faced, snotty-nozed imitation of a thinking process, powered more by stolen music than by actual analysis.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Amid all those "outsiders of the week", ever since the net went public its biggest componants and financial backers have been the huge brick and mortar businesses. Suburban hackers and dot coms have at their best been a far second to IBM, 3M, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, General Motors and all of the other multi-billion dollar companies that, through their own use of the net, covered the costs of building it so the eschewed hackers Jon so loves to think he's in touch with could write a few perl scripts.
If we're talking about ideas that are at the heart of the net and what most represents them, I'd have to say that for the last 8 or 10 years - since the net started to be really popular - that idea has been self-promotion, whether of a mega corporation or an idea or a person. My vote for the epicenter of this use of the net is jennicam.
Ok,
Now that I have your attention, I would like to point out a fact that a lot of people seem to miss:
Jon is good for slashdot. He makes you think. Yes, a lot of his articles are high on the fluff-meter, but he means well AND, it's his opinion. You are allowed to voice yours, he is allowed to voice his. Many people here despise him, and yet they keep on posting replies to his messages. That's exactly what is wanted here. He gives a view point, you say BS, jump on it, and add your $.02. Then, your opinion is considered, people post to that, and so on. It's called communication, and it rocks. If you really don't like his articles, go to your preferences page and stop seeing them.
One last thing...Jon is human like the rest of us, please keep those posts that call him stupid, an asshole, etc., to a minimum. How would you like it if a bunch of people got together and PUBLICLY posted how much of a moron you are?
Let the flames/trolls begin.
Sent from your iPad.
I keep forgetting that carriage returns don't work here... I've reposted with all the geeky html tags necessary to format my message properly. So much for my karma, I'll probably be banned from this site for this little fiasco. How will I ever live down this shame?!
I like reading Katz's stuff he is IMO a rational humanist a la Chomsky and there is a need for him but... he seems to walk a twilight zone between reporting and deporting himself as a modern day soothsayer. The sampling and mix of his writtings ends coming off like a rapper's attempt at high rhetoric. Leading off with a sentence like: "Where's the heart of the Net now? A.I. or AOL?" suggests a rather purerile need for illiteration over content especially in light of the see saw set of statements littered throughout the article as follows: " The Net has evolved, and radically. It's much too big and diverse for a single locus" .02c goes back to the golden rule of site development. Content, Content, Content. Content is the heart of the net. Napster was a powerful engine that drove Broadband usage but the fuel was content, i.e., music. The Broadband initiative has stalled worldwide but the reason can be said to be simply that the net doesn't supply content necessary to prompt customers to pay up. "Build it and they will come."
"-- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over"
"Where's the heart of the Net now? The odd truth is that there probably isn't one."
If there is an epicentre there is a centre, no matter that *it* floats. My
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
The 'net has always been about information transfer. The question underneath all the expressed angst seems to be the "value" of the information.
It seems reasonable to assume that the cost and speed of data transfer in the early days of the internet served as a filter for determining how "valuable" the information was considered. As the price decreased, the holes in the sieve grew larger and the amount of less valuable information increased. Where we stand in that trend today I will leave to your judgement, but it is arguably a collapse toward a mean where the information typically has little value at all.
In the middle of all this is the 'net's equivalent of samazdat - the underground literature of the former Soviet Union - where somehow information that's valued is being transferred. Where the traditional media is increasingly concentrated in the editorial hands of a few, the internet remains one of the few ways for either rapid broadcast to many or discreet transmission to few.
Both corporate and government policies seem bent on increasing control over this information. The heart of the net will increasingly deal with the ability to freely disseminate information of value without prior official oversight.
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
is Jon Katz...
I know it's in vogue to bash JK, but I can't help it here...
What's the point of this? It's a long, rambling, generally pointless survey of the evolution of the Internet.
"The 'net has changed!!!" Oh my God... Stop the Presses! Hide the women and sysadmins! Jon has had a revelation of gargantuan proportions! Thank you for this brilliant insight Jon!
*sigh* I really don't feel like anything I read these days from JK is anything more than a stream of semi-consciousness that fails to do anything more than steal minutes away from my life, and prove once again that he is the quintessential Mr. MOTO (Master Of The... damn... I'm catching Katz Disease.)
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
What is the centre of books? What do all TV programmes have in commmon? Little or nothing. They're media, and they're only as interesting as their content. As more people access the internet, more of human life will be accessable. The less the internet is "about" something, the more interesting it will be.
My complaint about Jon Katz:
May I be cynical for a bit? I hope you don't mind,
but with Katz's latest barrage of
malodorous notions, I can't resist the urge to make a
few cynical comments. To get right
down to it, some of the facts I'm about
to present may seem shocking. This
they certainly are. However, it's time that a few
facts had a chance to slip through the fusillade of hype.
What's my problem, then? Allow me to present it
in the form of a question: Where are the people
who are willing to stand up and acknowledge
that Katz, in his infinite wisdom, has decided
to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests?
On the surface, it would seem to have something to do
with the way that his whole approach is repugnant.
But upon further investigation, one will find that
by allowing Katz to put mephitic thoughts in our
children's minds, we are allowing him to play puppet master.
As for the lies and exaggerations, Katz's
epigrams are rife with contradictions
and difficulties; they're entirely maladroit,
meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited
for a supposedly educated population.
And as if that weren't enough, if Katz is going to
obstruct important things, then he should at least have
the self-respect to remind himself of a few things: First, a
true enemy is better than a false friend. And
second, many people respond to his debauched vituperations
in much the same way that they respond to television
dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but
they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything
about them. That's why I insist we pronounce the truth
and renounce the lies.
Even people who consider themselves scornful
foolhardy-types generally agree that Katz's slurs
symbolize lawlessness, violence, and misguided rebellion
-- extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us
lose more than a little freedom. One might conclude
that Katz is incapable of writing a letter without using
such phrases as "crapulous pop psychologists", "loquacious
exhibitionists", "oppressive personae non gratae", or
some combination thereof. Alternatively, one might conclude
that Katz has a different view of reality from the rest of us.
In either case, if you're not part of the solution,
then you're part of the problem. His historical record of
fickle pleas is clearer than the muddled pronouncements
of his apple-polishers for a variety of reasons. For
instance, the worst sorts of inconsiderate Neanderthals there
are must be treated with political justice, not with
civil justice, as they are sincerely not real citizens. Let me
rephrase that: I wonder if he really believes the
things he says. He knows they're not true, doesn't he?
A complete answer to that question would
take more space than I can afford, so I'll have to give
you a simplified answer. For starters, if
we let him cause riots in the streets, then greed,
corruption, and tribalism will characterize the government.
Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens.
And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the
media and educational institutions.
Even Katz's bedfellows couldn't deal with the full impact of
Katz's refrains. That's why they created "Katz-ism," which is
just a garrulous excuse to force square
pegs into round holes. He plans to drag everything
that is truly great into the gutter. He has instructed
his votaries not to discuss this or even admit to his
plan's existence. Obviously, Katz knows he has
something to hide. Most of you reading this letter
have your hearts in the right place. Now
follow your hearts with actions. I have traveled the length and
breadth of this country and talked with the best people. I can
therefore assure you that Katz's artifices cannot stand on
their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate
artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Katz's
warnings can give us deeper insights into the nature of
reality. We can and we must protect ourselves by any means
necessary against the unrestrained bestiality
of stupid, quasi-macabre paper-pushers. And that's the honest truth.
The "Net" wasn't designed to be a "medium" of any sort, individualistic or not. It was simply a way for users of computer systems to access resources on other systems - a throwback to the days when most serious computers were military and/or academic and resources were scarce and widely scattered. It was also designed to be more reliable than traditional communications methods.
That's pretty much the original design goal, Jon. Everything else, even e-mail (even TCP/IP itself), is just a function that was grafted on to the original design. The Web? An accident, really. Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an easy navigation system for researchers and created the Web. The uses we've come up with for it are something else entirely.
There's also a lot more to the Internet than the Web though, Jon. And things like the specialized communities of Usenet, the P2P file sharing systems like Gnutella, and such add to the experiences you speak of. The Internet has become an entertainment medium, but it's not just about that, even though you write about it as if all Web content is now provided by Disney.
It's not the case at all. All the quirky individual sites still exist, though some have gone and others appeared. There's still communities out there - hell, Slashdot is really one of them. They're more lost in the noise than they were in the days when there were a few hundred websites and they were all listed on Netscape's "What's Cool" page, but you can still find what you want without too much trouble.
So I don't buy this one, Jon. Just because AOL has a lot of users who type with one hand doesn't mean the Net has become a different medium. It's just that not everyone has the same high-minded hopes and lofty goals you do. Most people probably are just looking to read (or watch) news, buy stuff, get some amusement, find people like them to talk to, and (sorry) get their rocks off once in a while. The Net isn't just a place for the elite anymore, and that's fine, because the "elite" can still do what they want to do.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I was fortunate to know the 'net from 1985 to 1994. (I'm sure some of you will remember the Great AOL Invasion.) I could read, every day, all the newsgroups I liked, and could try out a new one. I could browse for information with gopher and archie. Mailing lists were sources of highly distilled information. I connected to BBSs, and guess what, their main points of interest were "products, games, and entertainment". Today, it takes more work, but I can still get the stuff I want. I use a gui browser when I must, but I usually use lynx. The most notable thing is that there are many more choices today. I like that.
Centralized Intelligence->
Descentralized Intelligence->
Centralized Media->
Descentralized Media->
Centralized Business->
...
Se where do I want to go? I believe net's future is on the services part of the economy, but descentralized. You will have individuals offering their work without much interference from large companies. Like a peer to peer trade system.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
My introduction to the internet was through a shell and then a shell account on an ISP. My ISP yanked it, waiving it as some thing they had always planed on doing. So far they haven't moved all their users to MSN or something like it, but with new ownership in the future I wouldn't be surprised to find further limitations on how I may use my connection.
As AOL, MSN and others work to close up the internet, lopping off heads of the hydra, they get it down to a few manageable heads. The vanquished hearts or souls be damned.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
User created discusion on the topic of Katz.
I think looking for a 'locus' of the web may be missing the point entirely. As everyone on Slashdot's aware, one major phenomenon (though perhaps not the major phenomenon, as I will leave that genre of journalistic oversimplification to Mr. Katz) shaping the web right now is P2P networking, which is based largely on the premise of decentralisation. Maybe the central phenomenon defining the web right now is the elimination of a 'centre'. At any rate, looking for formative phenomena doesn't seem to be helpful in any way, in creating an understanding of the web. If anything, that kind of practice just generates problematic, quickly outdated generalisations to confound the general populace. And please, no metaphors, for god's sake. All we need is another 'information superhighway'.
On the other hand, bringing personal telecommunications back to the level of decentralisation that the BBS era allowed will be a difficult thing to do.
super-8 film succeeded because now you could watch porn at home.
VHS won, because Sony wouldn't let porn on Betamax.
The first "multi-angle" DVD's were porn
as the poster above states porn dominates the internet.
porn dominates spam. and drives spamming technology (well, porn and credit card offers)
jpeg? send porn pictures to your friends faster
mpeg? send porn movies to your friends faster
porn drives all media
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
We had to walk five miles in a blizzard to use the 'net. You young whippersnappers have it way too easy..Just open the browser and there it is. We 'roughed it' to use the 'net. We used Trumpet Winsock and Windows 3.1 ...and Mosaic!
Youngens...they just have it way too easy!But I'll tell you..those shell and SLIP accounts..they just don't make 'em like they used to in the good old days!
Just the peoples comments to them. Much more intersting.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And of course the net has evolved. Slashdot evolves every few hours, does it not? Everything on the net changes. No changes means no one visiting something they've always seen. Eventually, with these information changes, other things eventually get added. Look at Yahoo. Look at Google. Even slashdot gets new features to its slashcode. All these things cost money. Unless you're rich, you would at least like to recouperate these costs. Hence advertising. Even more new features to attract new customers.
Unless you're selling things via AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace.
So, those sites that get slashdotted by us "tech elites" actually aren't reaching us? What about "all your base are belong to us". What of Napster? All these things reached a large chunk of the net. Invent a new search engine, better than Google. Include what you like on the homepage. You'll reach a hell of a lot of people.
As for new media sites struggling, can it be argued that the information on their sites is no longer of the quality it used to be? Because an article is split into as many as fifteen pages, each page containing at most three paragraphs? Media sites are forgetting the one main reason we visit them. For media in one easy-to-find place. Not split across pages so that advertising is shoved in our faces fifteen times instead of once.
Enter AOL, then and now a Main Street for middle-class access. Its labyrinthine commercial sites, shameless peddling of goods, vast network of messaging boards and sex sites...
Well, of course AOL is peddling things. Its a business. Give me a free access ISP, and I'll give you a much freer (sp?) internet. How can the internet truly be free when we have to pay to access it? (Free Library internet access withstanding - but how many people use that constantly?)
Of these developments, probably the early design era -- the Net's actual construction -- was its most idealistic. The early BBS's felt -- and were -- revolutionary, and few of the people first going online could help but feel they were participating in and witnessing the birth of a new kind of culture.
Well... duh. If you were there building the first spaceship to go to the moon, would you not feel the same? The same for building the original IBM PC? Anyone involved in building something big will feel the same way. And no longer will you feel the same about the future. How many of us really care if man lands on the moon again? Do we really care about another new PC with cries of "it'll change culture as we know it"? Been there, done that.
Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods...
What about P2P nowadays? Could that not be the new "heart" of the web?
The free software movement, in fact, was the apogee of the Net's most recent political period, the legacy to the hacker idea of liberating information...
Wrong. Most people don't care, or have any thoughts about "free software". How can that be political, when most people don't care? Compare it to things such as abortion, terrorism, or even gay rights, and suddenly everyone has an opinion.
The internet is a communications medium. Don't ever forget that. Where's the heart of the Net now? Where's the heart of television or radio? There isn't one. And those mediums have survived without one. Yes, whilst television might not always have great shows on, then why does almost every household possess at least, and often more than, one television?
The Internet has grown up. It's through its childhood (ARPAnet, with its heart in academics and defense) and just recently got through its crazy teenage years (the dot-com boom!). It's not -done- growing up yet, by any means, but it's a heck of a lot more mature than it used to be, and it's got a heck of a lot more diversified in the process. You might as well ask "What's the heart of the Library of Congress?" With everything from amateur webzines to CNN, from personal homepages to vast realms of technical scientific data, from spam and porn to rational, well-argued intellectual discussions, there's a little bit of everything on the net these days.
And that's the way it should be.
Oh good. I'm not the only one who's noticed that 90% of feedback on a Katz article is shooting down everything he says. The man does provoke many a great conversation, but only by trolling and flaming and somehow being able to get it posted on the front page. Kudos to you, Jon - you're the epitome of what all the AC Trolls want to be.
do not read this line twice.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
in 1997: HIP 97
in 2001: HAL 2001
...with real-world things begin to hold.
The US air transportation system doesn't have a single heart, but it certainly does have a few large hubs.
The US government certainly has a *something* in Washington, DC. Many would argue both for and against calling it a heart or brain, though.
Beyond those two, our modern country and world get terribly diffuse.
Where is the heart of the Interstate Highway System?
Is Kansas still the heart of the US? (Read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.)
Or perhaps according to William Gibson and other cyberpunks, the religion of the Internet is Voodoun. So obviously the Heart must be somewhere in the Carribean.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It really depends on the perspective of the person using the Net. To my 78 year old mother, the heart centers around medical information websites. To my 18 year old nephew its centers around music d/l, chatrooms and instant messaging, and no doubt a liberal amount of pROn thrown in. To my 23 year old neice in college, its research, shopping, IM and chat. To me its a job, convenient shopping, and research.
Just as in meatspace, each persons perspective is colored by their perceptions and interests, and each persons reality is what they perceive it to be. Just like having 10 witnesses to an accident, you will get 10 different descriptions of the what the heart of the internet is. Multiply that by the billions now using the net and you have that many hearts.
I thought it would be more like:
the Spleen = www.slashdot.org
...
maybe not...
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
For me, the heart of the net are the people using it.
And yes, there are many many epicentres. And many epicentres that didn't even hear of each other. So don't be so uppish and think the one big thing you participated in is the heart of the net.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
AOL may be the "Net" for millions, but who cares? Those folks were never really a part of the internet community anyway. From when I first started surfing newsgroups and gopher (in 1993) the net was a cacaphony of ideas without a centralized or focused direction or power. Has that changed?
The industrialization of the net hasn't changed the "core" (if there is such a thing) of the Internet one bit! If anything, it's perpetuated what many corporations/people/organizations fear: Totally and completely open exchange of ideas, information, commerce, etc.. It's something the marketing folks can't quantify, the sales people can't estimate, the politicians can't control.
Amazon makes a profit, France has outlawed Nazi paraphenalia (mis-speelled like a champ), but has that really changed anything? The "media guerillas" haven't been slowed, much less stopped. IBM is pushing a FREE (as in beer) OS! MS calls it a virus. Some "geek" zine has a heated, flame-filled, yet also containing some pretty good posts, about a license change to something that doesn't fully work! The implications of this change may have very interesting consequences. It may define which open licenses are most effective and the fate of this project may determine how much control a certian company has over the PC in the future. It may look minor now, but what happens if Wine takes off? What if suddenly everyone can easily use software written for windows on Linux/BSD/*NIX? What then? OTOH, it may fail and fall flat, but isn't the journey the point?
Some of the most exciting developments are happening in the open, under no corporate guidance, on this wierd, wild and uncontrolled medium. People named Theo, Linus, Miguel and many others are making decisions which are at least as important as those being made by people named Lou and Larry.
Is the spirit of the Internet dead, changed, "corporatized"? I should think not. It has matured, but is hardly dead. If anything, it has hardened as many have watched, with resentment, as corporations, governments and others attempt to control and restrict that which they also seek to profit from. OTOH, we've also seen evidence of the potantial of this unrestricted exchange of ideas.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Jon Katz's Ego
Seeking the Heart of the Net
Now I am sleeping
Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
yet another clutching at straws article from mr katz. can we have a follow-up entitled along the lines of "who f**king cares".
"Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods."
of all the drivel, this is my favorite piece of horses@!t.
by implying that something is the "heart" of something you are defining it as a central component capable of breating life into an entity...napster did no such thing...it was an f'in tool used by people (the only true heart of the net) to share music...thats it.
the "pivotal-period" of napster was not pivotal for the net you ass. has the net physically changed as a result of napster...no...it was pivotal for several money making groups and lawmakers...and for us...well, there are other programs out there.
it blows my mind how the uneducated press can contort the net into being this entity capable of changing our lives in ways we could not dream...when will they understand that its simply a conduit for transmitting information...its the information that can change our lives...will broadband help our society reach new levels of civilization??? no, things like nuclear fusion will...but then again, even jon cant pretend to know something about that.
dude.
people are the heart of the internet.
engines are the hearts of cars.
burgers are the cornerstone of any nutrinitial breakfast.
On PBS
Best Slashdot Co
127.0.0.1/8
http://www.club977.com/ - The 80's Channel!
Your source for commercial free 80's music!
I'm on it! Google, here I come!
Italians really understand, what good JonKatz comments are for - simply looking at the name, italians know, this guy has no more brain than a dickhead.
But I don't get it. Why is Katz still a featured writer? What's the appeal? Is he Troll-In-Residence? Is there some slashdot lore (from the early days) that explains it? Seriously. It's beyond wierd at this point.
For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
A niche question here, but I would be interested to hear from John (or anyone) on why you think this is or is not so. I have spent a lot of money there and have seen it absorb the online entities of Toys 'R Us, IMDb and others. In what ways has this affected all marketing across America?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
I've been on the net as a hobbyist and wannabe-geek for over a decade now, which to many people on Slashdot might not seem all that impressive. And in a technical scheme of mind, it isn't. But when I was 16 years old and hiding in my own apartment from the morons inhabiting the real world in my area, the Internet became my primary conduit to any sort of community.
First it was MUDs, then MUSH. As technology advanced, the only things I really valued were managing to have a computer that would let me play some of the latest games and let me run a terminal window to one of the communities I practically grew up on. For years, despite the balkanization of the net brought about by deregulation and the emergence of the national ISPs, I found community in those textual realms. Unfortunately, as time has gone on and the quality of people online has degraded further away from those of us with an innate interest in the concept and technology toward today's "All Aboard" culture. For me, the heart of the net was something I felt innately, but always had a hard time placing when the time came. Was it in the exposure I had to people of other cultures and locations? Was it the close friends I made and maintained to this day? Both. But furthermore, it was a place where I felt like I had something in common with -everyone- else there. We were all on the Internet instead of doing "normal" things.
Now, the "normal" thing to do is AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, email... My mother has an Internet account. I can no longer say that I have something in common with everyone, and in that way the heart of the net has just seemed to slow it's beat. The balkanization has come around to completion, and it just doesn't feel quite right anymore. I seek out other communities, but the spirit just isn't there. I can't tell if it's because I've aged, the Internet has grown, or a combination of both.
I feel like there's a need to create a new community on top of the Internet, some massive VPN of exclusive, open sourced applications and services meant to bring people together without fear of corporate takeover. A sort of Open Internet. Maybe this way we can reclaim something like what existed before the rise of commercialism.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Shut up! No Really.
The "NET" as we so like to call it is merely a tool and/or medium. It is the "message" that we need to concentrate on.
The corporate messages are thus:
1) The "NET" can be used to make money.
2) The "NET" can be used to control/influence thought.
The hacker message:
1) The "NET" is k3wl.
2) The "NET" is just one giant shooting ground with a lot of slow moving targets.
The programmer's message:
1) The "NET" is a communication medium. Be it person-to-person, computer-to-computer, or program-to-program.
So there's no current epicenter. That just means that the "NET" has grown large enough for more than one group to expand the boundaries at the same time. If anything, we should look at this comoditization as a positive step and we can concentrate on the things that go on top of the "NET" rather than the "NET" itself.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Whether you love him or hate him, Jon really brings out a few salient talking points in this article. I might even venture out and say that I agree with him on most of his points. However, "me too" does not a good Slashdot comment make, so let me expound a little on why the gloom and doom of the corporatization of the Internet isn't all that bad.
First of all, the corporatization of the Internet has helped to push higher speeds and ubiquity. These two factors alone, while meant to benefit the middle class users, have only helped to lower the cost of entry to future nerds, geeks, hackers and coders.
I'm 25 now, but as a kid growing up in the late 80s, getting any kind of net access was a struggle and a hopeless quest. Enter BBSes and the like. Most of us probably cut our teeth on the BBS. Then enter Freenets (like Cleveland Freenet) and the like. Back then the network was considered blazingly fast at 14.4K. However, my view of what the Internet was and could be was completely blown away upon my visit to the campus of Case Western Reserve in Late 1993. What I saw there was a completely fiber network and the web.
Wow. *that* was cool.
Fast forward to now. Most of the kids coming into college have already experienced the Internet much as I was only able to do once reaching the university. The young hackers in their larval stage come in with a store of knowledge that I could only dream about. I am convinced that we now have more hackers and more technological enthusiasts than we ever have had before. While this may seem like an obvious and trite observation, we need to consider this when also taking into account the fact that the "commodity" usage of the Internet has gone up as well.
In other words, sure, the vast majority of Internet users use it in a utilitarian way. However, now, more than ever, there are users who are using it as a tool to expand their own knowledge and to explore new frontiers of technology. I almost look upon this as romantic, in a weird sort of way, in the way that New York is romantic. I draw the analogy by thinking of both the city and the Internet as being unimaginably dense with people, ideas, culture and thought. However, just underneath the surface, if you look close enough, you'll find your niche, you'll find the "underground".
Granted, most people don't give a shit about the underground. But who cares? It's still there and we can still use. We can still build and we can still expand it. The Internet doesn't exist to fill one purpose or to have one center. The Internet exists to be whatever we want it to be. Again, at the risk of sounding trite, we are slowly and quietly moving towards the concept of cyberspace discussed in early and seminal cyberpunk literature. Think back to the writings of Gibson and Sterling.
So, in closing, in response to the questioned lack of center and the concept that most Internet users are simply Internet consumers, I simply respond, "So what". All we can hope is that right minded individuals will find their calling and explore what makes this whole thing tick. We can hope that they will find out about Open Source software and becoming contributing members to the global computing community. It's not a utopian goal by far, but it is the way things have been and continue to be moving. In every group of people who are content with the status quo and accepting the medium for what it is, there are those individuals like ourselves who are willing to take the next step to make the medium do what we want. There's nothing wrong with that. Let the Internet continue to grow!
/. is not insane. Katz gets to post because Katz consistently generates comments. In the past 30 posts to
If you really want Katz to go away, just don't post to his articles. It's not hard. Why just in those last 30 posts, Katz scored a low 14 and 5 comments. So its not like he is impossible to ignore, you know.
PS: It pisses me off that this man shares his name with the most beloved comedian of all time...
"I like to wear big boy pants."
Slashdot is the GI tract of the Net. "Where News for Nerds is Digested and Excreted on a Regular Basis."
Was that out loud?
- Select your handle link at the top of the main page. The one that talks about the page being generated by flocks of monkeys, gaggles of toasters, etc.
- Then select the "homepage" link in your preferences area.
- Scroll down a little ways, and you'll see an "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section.
- Click on the check box labeled "JonKatz".
Click the "save" button at the bottom of the page.
Yay, you'll enjoy a Katz-free life.Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Hi,
... and lonely ... sniff ...
... and my english is a bit rusty ...
I do not think that you can see the net as an organism. Maybe it is better to see it as a company. It started for me in 1992 like a small company where you start working and feel comfortable because very soon you more or less know all the people, you are involved with nearly everything and know where to find all the important stuff. You know how to contact the people in the tool shop, the production and the management. You get to know how and why decisions are found and understand their impact.
Then you drop out for a few years, come back and the backyard sports car manufacturer Lotus has turned into Daimler-Chrysler with a vast palette of different businesses, branches, subcompanies and products. Before, you were fifty people of ten different nationaltities and all talked to each other. Now there are thousands and small "ethnically closed" groups form and talk only to each other. Still there are small toolshops somewhere, but they are hidden and unknown to the common employee. Also, there is some company secruity nowadays, and people who stop a conveyor belt in manufacturing are seriously punished, whereas everybody only laughed when you converted the paintspraygun into a sodamachine in the old days.
But still, such a company can keep its spirit and being there can feel good, even if you know there is no heart. But I agree, the larger something is, the more anonymously it usually is.
Sometimes I start feeling homeless
First STFU, Katz post!
Eat it, Jon. You are not interesting.
Only Jon could turn the word "Disney" in to an adverb...
he spends half his time saying "the net has no center" and the other half telling us "corporations are at the net's center".
one of his personalities is right. the net has no center. it only seems overrun by corporations if you visit corporate sites and use corporate internet software exclusively.
for those of us with imagination, there's a lot out there. try visiting something that's not linked from yahoo.com once in a while, jon.
I guess you aren't on the right lists then Jon. Too bad they're invite-only.
First, let me say that alot of what Mr. Katz says is true.
1. The worst part. Corporations have bastardized the current net, making it largely a medium through which they can continue ****ing their consumers up the a**.
2. The somewhat troublesome part. Filtering/blocking/etc. I see the point he's making, that increased filtering technologies allows us to close of all viewpoints except those that we agree with. That is one potential use. Another potential use is simply to block out the junk: the scam-advertisements you see on every page, the SPAM-scam e-mails you get, website popups that always ask you, "Do you want Flash 5.0" (NO! FU very much. Flash bites and is nothing more than a fancy way for them to shove their pornographic scam ads in my face!). I think that most people don't use filtering technology to block out views they disagree with, but rather to block out stuff that's pure nonsense. On the other hand, moderation technology IS used to block out views you don't agree with. How many of you here have moderated someone down because they supported intellectual property? This could be solved by making moderation more complex: i.e., a questionare about ea. comment: (1) Well written? (2) Concise? (3) Elegant? (4) Funny? (5) Regarding authoritarian/libertarian, on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the most Libertarian, 10 being the most authoritarian, how would you rate it? (6) Regarding conservative/liberal, on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the most Liberal, 10 the most Conservative, how would you rate it? (7) etc etc. No questions aside from well-written/concise/elegant/funny, would directly mod up or down. Ideological questions would mark messages with different color codes or symbols for different ideologies; some user settings would have it such that those were modded up or down.
3. The part that doesn't trouble me much. Pornography. Well, some kinds of it. There are two types of pornography: (1) Free pornography, largely done by amateurs, or posted on news-groups. This usually includes minimal advertisements or popups, and doesn't ask for your credit card. (2) Commercialized pornography. This usually gives you fifteen zillion pop-ups, lots of ads, and asks for your credit card number. Also, most of these are frauds; you give them your credit card number, they take your money, and then your left with either no pictures, or crappy ones. Type (1) pornography is ok. Type (2) pornography is not ok -- it decreases the utility of the net, and makes the entire net slower. Of course, there's also the "brands" of porn (i.e., SM, lesbian, hard-core, soft-core, artsy, child). Some of these may be objectionable, but the only one's for which objection is seriously warranted (smut, rape, child, where it actually came from such an incidence) are cases where the damage has already been done.
There are others, but I won't go into them.
Regarding the first and worst, the corporatization of the net. I believe there are ways to maintain the net's functionality while still allowing corporations to communicate info about their products. Google espouts one of thsoe ways -- specialized text-based ads that show up when certain searches are done. The thing that isn't compatable is banner ads, which probably account for most of what you d/l when you go to a page, as well as clogging up the net.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_net work/AS_Network.xml
I would like to thank Slashdot for this editorial as I found it very informative. It told me everything I missed during my ten year coma. Thanks again!
P.S.: If I suffer one in the future you can just email your recap to me, as to the rest of the world it's old news.
If you don't like AOL's portal (it looked rather tame to me) then click the minimize widget, and open a browser, or other winsock compliant software. Now AOL is a (heavy) connection client.
Okay, someone has to say it: the Internet is packed solid with degenerate demihumans who use the vast powers of a global network to find recipes for cheese toast and pictures of Jennifer Lopez. It is CB radio, crackling with posers with idiot callsigns trying to feel cool and find anyone to listen. We all know that, and there may or may not be anything wrong with that, per se.
It just annoys me that all of this intelligence (of various degrees) has been put into a system for idiots. Yeah, yeah: that's the way it goes. Whatever. I'm still waiting for the Internet's John Galt moment when the technically inclined abandon their monkey users.
The heart of the Internet probably is AOL, and that is a harbinger of the inexorable slide of the human intellect into entropy if there ever was one.
Sigh. I guess I just miss the days when I signed at the university computer lab and could find meaningful content on the larval Internet.
Hey, she's not bad at all! :)
...can be so US-centric. Hel-lo!
The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network.
Obviously you haven't set foot outside of the U.S. Ever. In developing and backward countries where people have no concept of "civil rights" and "freedom", the Net IS THE social, political, and idealistic outlet. Take China, for example. For the first time in half a century, people have found a public medium that they can voice dissent with their country's political views.
And yet you tell me it isn't social or political or idealistic. I say you're not opening your eyes and looking around much. The Net has, can, and hopefully WILL be this for millions worldwide who NEED it to be so.
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
but I surely know the location of its anus:
John Katz, the biggest asshole online.
Way back when, DARPA started the net to create a network of spreading information and to create a network that would survive a nuclear attack and enable the US to strike back.
Hopefully the bit about the strike back is now a thing of the past (although with G.W. Bush in charge... who knows...) but the spreading of information is still the heart of the net.
Just because these days, a lot of people are more interested in passing around spam and other such rubbish, it is still information that a varity of people want. Just because you hate spam doesnt mean that everyone else does.
I think that there is still a centralised heart to the net, but I dont think that it is ever going to be MSN or AOL... in the end, they will just become irrelevent to the average person.
As the middle class of net users becomes more switched on, they will start to ignore more and more of the rubbish put out there by AOL and other companies like that.
In 10 years time when the hostile youth of today are in their late 20 and early 30's, they will look at the hostile youth of their day and wonder whats making the kids so bad, conveniently forgetting the stuff they used to do.
Hopefully the net will be there in 10 years time, and will still be a free medium for people to put their point of view across without some government or corporation absolutely destroying the person for not seeing things the way the governments or corporations want them to.
If the net is in the hands of the governments and corporations, then free speach is dead and we all might as well have stamps on our foreheads and dance to the company themes...
Long live a free internet with a heart of free information.
*** I had a
DNS is its blood.
maybe network solutions or verisign are its heart, but i doubt it.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Thanks for the link, mizhi. A good read.
words...words...words...
The heart of the net is Computers.
Sheesh, Katz... I mean, really.
Starts with a sweeping generalization based on nothing but a vague idea of Katz's ("It seemed the Net always had a heart... like the Tin Man.")
Asks histrionic, theoretical questions by the end of the first paragraph ("Is this culture dying out? Is the world about to change forever? Is Technology X dead? Will Flash Gordon escape from the Pit of the Morlocks?")
Insists on using phrases like "cyber", "cyber-geeks", and "Wired magazine guru", when even Dateline NBC's Jane Pauley finds them too unhip to say anymore.
Features the Bleeding Obvious lead sentence. ("The Net has evolved, and radically. Bears are shitting in the woods, and in great numbers. Despite the machinations of cyber-geek hack information guerillas everywhere, the Pope is still Catholic.")
Sports CmdrTaco style proofreading ("Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's [sic] most pivotal periods.")
Maintains four-color, Jack Kirby philosophy of good vs. evil (Napster good, corporations bad; Napster frees us from the "hoary grip" of the record companies, much like the Fantastic Four escaping from the clutches of Mole Man.)
Uses lots and lots of passive voice
Wraps up with a nattering, waffling conclusion ("It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Have you ever looked at your thumb? I mean really looked at it? Do you think bees dream?")
The next big internet revolution....will be when everyone acts as their own server. People have complained alot about how the free nature of the net has been corrupted, and how you can only get widely distributed/heard if your affiliated.
But the day is coming where everyone will be able to use their own computer to act as a server.
These are my observations:
(1) Broadband is only getting broader. Despite the fact that the people at Global Crossings are greedy bastards who should be shot for selling out their shareholds by declaring bankruptcy, they did layout a global fiber-optics network. As more and more fiber-optics networks are built, the net will only get faster.
(2) CPU's are only getting faster. Moores law still holds, a doubling of computer speed every 18 months, or a 1.5x increase every year. Currently, the fastest desktop computers run at about 2GHz...applying Moore's Law, in 10 years, computers will operate at 2 * (1.5^10) = 115GHz. That is, 57 times faster than the fastest today. Now, unless software developers like MS really drop the Ball on software, software shouldn't be 57 times slower in ten years (running on todays machines). OS' are basically already as graphically complex as they need be: Apple's OS X, BeOS' GUI, some of Linux's GUI's (i.e., Nautilis), and even Windows are already as graphically adequate as they need be...all that's needed is some fine tuning.
(3) Hard drives and RAM technology is only getting faster, as well. Not at quite the rate of CPU's, but still getting faster. Not to mention, getting larger.
(4) For the same performance, all of these technologies are getting cheaper.
(5) Information isn't getting larger. Movies are still usually 3hrs max; music, normally 10min max, perhaps 1hr if its a symphony; books, usually under 2,000 pages; scientific papers or review articles, usually under 100 pages; the typical graphic, usually 200 Kb. Granted, some type of supplemental information ARE getting "larger"; as technology develops, scientists, for example, may start including not only "Figures" in their papers on Journals, but also links to entire videos, perhaps of them explaining something, perhaps of a process observed under a microscope, perhaps of their entire experiments; similarly, games are getting "larger". But on average, the size of information is either not growing at all, or not growing rapidly. Most importantly, the rate at which the size the average type of information grows over time is not as large as the rate at which computer technology gets faster and larger.
(6) All OS' are getting better in (almost) all categories. Some are getting better at an extraordinary pace (like Linux). Some are already great and are simply fine-tuning in their respective areas of excellence (*BSD, BeOS, AmigaSDK). Some are good and are getting better in their GUI's at a medium pace (i.e., MacOS). One is pretty bad, though it has a huge software and hardware base, and is getting better in technical areas (though worse at choice/privacy issues, which may yet be corrected by the governhment) at a snail's pace: MS Windows. This is, of course, a generalization. OS's tend to get bettter in that they have more features, are easier to use, are more stable, and are more secure. Of coruse, they invariably get worse in performance and bloat. By getting worse in performance, I mean that considering the performance:features ratio, they're worse. By bloat, I also refer to that, and that they include *unnecessary* features (such as Windows "Guide" M&M's or whatever those round things are with faces that your supposed to ask questions to when u have problems). The problem of bloat and performance can of course be solved by applying pressure to developers : Namely, we don't want more useless features, we want you to correct the problems that exist and make it faster/smaller.
These are my conclusions:
(1) Many people will start using their own computers as servers from which to supply their own information to the world. No large fees will be required to do this, no corporate affiliation. This will be the major revolution. People will be able to publish content without censoreship from parent sites. Eventually, with a little bit of help from the government, people will be able to act as their own ISP's, should the government open up the cable lines.
Of course, as Lawrence Lessig pointed out, there are some problems with this. Cable service providers, likely a large part of the future of ISPs, don't have open cable-lines. They effectively have monopolies and no competition; its the opposite situation of the telephone lines, which have to be open. The Cable lines should be forced to be opened, just like the telephone lines were.
(2) The cost of getting space from official servers will be cheaper.
The next net-revolution will be a wave of personal publication from one's own computers, self-servicing in regards to getting on the net, which will (however) take longer. For the self-servicing part, people would be allowed to buy a certain portion of the bandwidth from a company for a certain price/year, without any regulation from the company, because you wouldn't be offering your info from their servers, but from your own "server".
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Real life can be cold and lonely. The net provides the mechanism to connect with that which feeds our soul. Just what it delivers varies by individual.
....
Love/Companionship - Chat
Sex - Porn/Chat
To be noticed - Chat/Personal Site
To be heard - Newsgroups
Education - Online classes
Geekdom - Slashdot
Avarice - Online Trading
Acquisition - Online Shopping
Competition - Online Gaming
ETC
My point is that the Net seems to provide one pipeline for so many of our needs. The real shame is that Real Life can do the same, but too many folks are so plugged in that they don't experience much human connection Real Life anymore.
Katz, you're either drunk, or have been replaced by a n00b Katz Clone.
There is no 'center' of the net. There's no place or idea or bandwagon where 'everybody wants to be'. That's what makes it so great.
Although, one might argue the focal point of the net today is spam. Like the 585 god damned messages, all spam, all unsolicited, I've gotten in the past two days.
Note to self - stop checking primary e-mail account.
The Internet has the potential of being even more revolutionary than it currently is. It has a many to many structure. TV is one to many. Face to face is few to few. Tests are many to one (from a teacher point of view).
The internet is many to many. The internet is many to many. Nopes. The magic doesn't go away if i repeat myself.
The magic is that the internet is quite hard to curb. There is no final omniscient editor that can filter out all unwanted messages. Why do you think the Chinese are trying so hard to censor the net? Why do you think the Taliban outlawed it?
Stop the brainwash
Well, I guess I'm finally motivated enough to go and find out if jonkatzsucks.com is registered...
No, it's available.
Tempting, very tempting indeed... oh, the karmic implications!
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Let me start by saying I am devided on this issue. Intellectual property rights are a social beleive not a law. In the sense that as long as 90% of America is willing to download free music or use key generators for winzip then Intellectual property rights will only exist to suburbia. Pot is illegal as well as under age drinking and if you go to a public univeristy you see how well that one is working out.
You thought you were special...Don't worry you were prgramed that way.
from the can-you-find-the-pulse? dept.
I'm afraid I can't. Then again, Katz probably couldn't find his ass with both hands, a flashlight, a Garmin GPS, a paper map, a host of dental mirrors, and a three hour remedial ass finding course on tape. So I guess that makes us even.
Jon, there's no singular "heart of the net." There's not a single culture out here. And we're not all greasy high school kids with black nail polish. Thanks for oversimplifying, though.
--saint
as i read this, it became increasingly obvious to me that this perspective of the web was one far different than mine... and then it dawned on me.
i use zeros and ones when it enhances my life. the author here uses zeros and ones for his life.
thats not a insult, (i do obviously choose to spend time with my computer as a hobby) but i wonder if people who dont spend so much time with the computer would have such a life altering view of the internet evolution as katz does here.
i know alot of people who dont know and dont care what the internet is, and are very happy, balanced, well adjusted, energetic people.
to then, all of the hoopla in the email is really over played.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
The "Heart of the Net" was always a fiction for maroons like Katz to bloviate about. Nothing has changed in that regard.
The Net does not need a heart and does not have one.
It does have a cloaca, and you've just surfed there.
In my country, that's called a metaphor. Don't worry, it doesn't bite.
From the beginning, the Net has always seemed to have a heart - a locus, a center of activity. At first the academics and defense researchers who'd created and patched together its architecture were its pulse. Then hackers in suburban bedrooms all over the country became the epicenter, followed by the free music and intellectual property guerrillas; this ordering is completely wrong. hackers in suburban bedrooms didn't have internet (i.e. tcp/ip) access to the net for several years after the unix programming community (not the defense community) had a significant presence. it is in that community from which most intellectual property guerillas have their roots. Unless you're selling things on AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace. this is absurd. its the "tech elites" that are precisely not the target of AOL and MSN. Since the Net has always been an almost organic, free-form entity -- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over. heh. go tell that to DARPA. the net has not always been a free-form, organic entity. it didn't become so till relatively late in its current lifetime. For a while, the heartbeat resided in the dream of new kinds of virtual and media communities -- the WELL, ECHO, Salon, Slate -- that popped up to connect people of common cultural or political interests. pardon? what do the WELL and ECHO have to do with Slate and Salon, the latter two being for-profit online journalism and the first two being not-for-profit community exchange forums? i am normally quite tolerant of Jon's articles here and amazed by the intensity of the abuse he suffers. on this occasion however, he's written an article that is really amazingly poorly constructed, thought out and written.
I'd suggest SourceForge, and similar collaboration sites, are the 'heart' of the net, where thousands of people are actually doing something besides reading, buying, and chatting.
Well actually, isn't it a medium of *information* as well as communication? In my tiny corner of the beast...oops, I mean "corner of the net"... I run a web library and our ability to assemble information resources "on demand" to create a unique body of knowledge is at least as important as our ability to communicate those resources to our web audience.
I think this an important distinction compared to the phone system and so on.
Otherwise there would be no computers programmed to spit out information, no routers to move it around, no cabling or wireless to carry it.
The heart of _everything_ is life and existence itself.
There, that was sufficiently contemplative.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I keep reading Katz out of morbid curiosity. It's funny: he types words, the words form sentances, the sentances form paragraphs, they parse like normal English, but they mean nothing, sometimes less than nothing. It could form the basis for a new understanding of information theory - negative information *is* possible. I swear to God, he has a lower signal to noise ratio than cosmic radio waves.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The main problem with the idea of the Net having a heart is that it isn't a single distinct entity. The "elite" in the areas of computers and networking might like to think of the internet as one big giant single entity because all parts of it are connected in some way, but there's more involved than just connection - you need at least some minimal sense of unity and uniform purpose to have an entity with a figurative heart.
.coms, etc. were the next big things that bandwagon jumpers-on embraced until the next one came along. They still existed afterward, sometimes even becoming more popular and/or useful long after the hype was gone, but they aren't in fashion.
/. for those of you reading this, e-mail address harvesters for spammers, porn for lonely geeks, etc. - because the "heart" of the Net isn't a characteristic of the Net itself, it is a projection of the individual's own bias onto a general medium.
Aside from a few tech columnists and other such computer-hip people, people don't think of themselves as internet citizens. The internet isn't a way of life, no matter what those AOL commercials might try to represent as common behavior. It might be fun to play with, it might be useful, and it might even be essential, but in the end it is just a tool. More people consider their devotion to a sports team to be a way of life than their web surfing.
Ignoring that for a moment, people still don't use the internet in the same ways. All of Katz's examples seem to be new uses that were popular for a while because they were new - academic work, music "sharing,"
The Net can't have a heart because of the freedom and flexibility given to its users - the Net is what you want it to be, more or less. It isn't a newspaper or magazine, all in a neat, well-organized package; it isn't a city, with everything linked by proximity and a common body of residents that identify themselves with that city more than another; it isn't even a single industry, with multiple distinct entities linked by common interests, feeding off each other while at the same time trying to improve their relative positions.
The internet is a network - nodes, links, and bits of data. It isn't restricted to certain uses or users, so it is difficult to characterize it as anything more than a general purpose medium. Its "heart" is whatever you want it to be - research document sites for academics,
Which organism would have an epicenter?
And not understanding a metaphor doesn't mean it's inappropriate. What are the five criteria for (biological) life? The Internet fulfils most.
I cannot believe that such an eggregious logical flaw exists in this slashdot article. What they are putting forth on the table is not the "heart" of the net, but the hype. That is, the buzzword of the day. In 1969, the heart of the internet were the scientists who put it together. Also, they were the big topic (i.e. hype).
The core of the internet was the scientific community. It remained that way for many years.
The "heart" of the internet, the pulse, always has been, and always will be, the flow of information.
In the early-mid 1990's, more people became exposed to the information flow that was the internet, utilizing it for their own purposes. There was nothing really "new", just more of it. Instead of sharing physics concepts, research information, and the like, people talked about sports, hobbies, etc.
The "dot-commerce" groups tried to build a business infrastructure on top of, and a business model centered upon, the internet.
The "hacker" group was exciting, but they were really no different than the physicists, engineers and scientists that used it in the first place. Their work just had a larger target audience.
The "Napsterization" of the internet added entertainment (music, movies, etc.) as a type of intformation exchange.
What will be the next big hype? Probably integration: merging entertainment, communication, productivity, and work all together.
But it is *NOT* in JonKatz's bunghole as he wishes it to be.
The corporations have only won the first round of combat in the courts. We've seen a lot of nonsensical cases get thrown out in the last year (Dimitry, Ford v. 2600), and many will be straightened out this year.
Congressman Bouche (D-Virginia) seems to be coordinating a push in the House to get IP laws applied the same to the Internet as they were everywhere else. While I believe such laws are too extensive in the real world* that would be much better than the ludicrous crap like the DMCA and SSSCA that target it now.
*Is Life + 75 years the "limited time" the Constitution speaks of for the duration of copyright? Assuming an author dies ten years after writing a book, the copyright will out last most people born five years after the books writing.
Was wondering when the obligatory anti-capitalism speech-of-the-day was coming.
Where is the Heart of the Internet? Who else to ask other than Al Gore?
My guess would be he put it in a "lockbox" probably inside his glove box. Only Al, the joint Chiefs of Staff, and Tipper know for sure.
I guess that depends on what you mean by hackers. I was exploring the internet when it was still young, learning programming from the more experienced and usenet, seeing what I could find out there. Granted my computer wasn't in my bedroom, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who was out there learning and exploring.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Long Live The Cabal!
Hey Norm... if you were a hot dog... would you eat yourself? Would you?
The center of the sun is over 5 MILLION degrees F... that's pretty darn hot Norm...
(humorous excerpt from saturday night live)
~ now you know
of the net was MAE East and MAW West? Silly me for not thinking metaphorically enough.
-> Capt Cosmic <-
Anyone who complains about moderation systems hasn't browsed at -1 recently.
Was back in the 90s. This was a time when I played Quake1 with friends over 56k, chatted, got into trouble, and owner of my ISP was my friend. This was the day when you could hack Quake, and find the IP of the luser running the bot, and everyone would DOS him off the server. :)
This was the time when IRC was 'the' shit, and everyone sat in the channel for a week without leaving, or being disconnected. This was the time before DSL/Cable, and being able to have T1 bandwidth was a DREAM, and gave you a sense of power on the net.
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
--------------------------
JonKatz, please stop posting this ego-stroking "I'm on Slashdot so I must be a guru about everything" tripe. You're not nearly as smart as you think.
"Heart of the net" sure sounds like an interesting research project! I wonder what the data they've collected supports! I'll read on!
:) That's what I get for accessing slashdot from a public computer.
Hmmm.
Hmmmmmmmm.
This kind of entirely qualitative, meaningless peanut-gallery speculation sure sounds like JonKatz. But it can't be - I filtered his dumb ass out. Lemme check who the author is.
JonKatz!? Wtf?
Oh, right, I'm an AC right now
is on Orion's website.
John, just wanted to say that I actually found this article interesting and thought provoking (a little USA biased, but not /that/ much). I know you get a lot of bad reponses.
Thought you might like to hear something positive.
Google is a good search engine, but I have had a lot of frustration getting my domain and personal web pages listed there. The number one search result of my name "robert nagle" is a listing of all the amazon reviews I've posted. My web pages remain invisible to the world most of the time. Even when I submit url's by hand, they are ignored for various reasons, some of which I understand, some of which I don't.
Google is notoriously bad about showing home pages put on the servers of a person's ISP as well as pages that were created by simple HTML editors. Once this content is moved out of the ISP's server, the pages are invisible again, and the individual has to endure the arduous wait of the search bot to find his site again. Corporations have more stables url's and automated ways of generating search-optimized pages, which is certainly beyond Joe HTML trying to put up pictures of his cat Fluffy.
Now, perhaps one could rationalize the predominance of corporation-generated pages by saying that corporations have an awful lot of content to offer. Amazon, for example, has captured a lot of literary and film criticism in its user comments.
Even if that is true, it doesn't weaken my point: google doesn't really show the Internet for what it is. I read somewhere that a large percentage of web pages was invisible to the major search engines or other. (I'm seem to remember the number was 70%; not sure). Google often produces helpful results out of what its bots are able to capture. But don't for a moment think that it captures the majority of the interesting stuff out there.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Holy shit, Jon Katz! You're really the epitome of intellectual minimalism. I'm studying literature in University, and I get sick whenever I hear that high-brow-modern-culture commentator speaking of "locus", "shifts in perspective" or "defamiliarization." These are simply empty terms, abstract ideas not based on aything empirical, but only on the perspective one projects over the facts. Who cares about the "locus" (you like to sound intelligent, don't you?) of the Internet, when it's a damn _tool_ not a living being, an organic body or a person. You make me think of these pretentious culture writers in 'zines like Wired/Village Voice/etc that try to sound intelligent by using big words and big generalizations to chase the zeitgeist and are constantly referring to a golden age that never was. Won't you stop whining about the present, and acknowledge that it's no more like your adolescent dreams? You just do not want to look at what's interesting now and critique it. I guess you are the best example that Free Speech is no panacea. Did you know that freedom entails also responsibility? Like the responsibility of shutting up when you don't have anything brillant to say.
Jon,
.50 cents. The small, green, hardcover version...
/.; I find them glib and shallow.
I just wanted to let you know that I am currently reading 'Geeks'.
I bought it at a thrift store where I normally buy old pc parts for
I have always disliked your movie reviews on
I also find your articles here on Slashdot to be deliberate bait. I usually skip them.
However, I am really enjoying 'Geeks'.
Your writing style seems more fluid. More personal and yes, it definitely seems to be better edited.
In particular, I like that you advanced the boys cash. That seems human; I'm currently at the point where they are planning their 2nd move, and I really hope that I see more interaction between them and you.
As most geeks now, once you find a mentor and someone that believes in you, things go better. I'm betting that your interaction played a big part in the success of these boys.
Additionally, have you done a follow up on the book? What became of these guys?
Anyway, I'm going to try re-reading your stuff in the hopes that it lives up to 'Geeks' on a second reading.
Routers.
Scientology links.
Open protocols.
Free music.
Post-9/11 web responses.
Chat hosts and BBS admins.
Ancient packet switchers.
Executive buzzwords.
Open Source.
Online directories.
Cyber greed.
That guy who just fragged you in Wolfenstein.
The Imperial Domain Droids.
Well-meaning POW/MIA industry dupes.
The Hamster Dance.
Paranoid cartoon fantasy diagrams.
War, damnation and hypertext.
Swedish fiber stations.
Statutory IRC.
Beepstalkers.
Geeks.
Perhaps 1% of the net is true selfless volunteering for the greater good
Greater good of what people though? Also, isnt open source volunteering in a way?
..pcable
And thats why my gameshow site is going to rule!
:)
Win money and then select the 3 hottest dates you can find on the net!
It rules in every sense.
www.richdate.com
God spoke to me
Dang, Katz, you have no clue.
There's not one site you mention as a previous "heart of the Net" that I've ever been to, and I've been on the net for 10 years.
There is no heart on the internet. There are many, many nodes, and people visit different ones based on their needs and wants.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Once again, Katz demonstrates his limp grasp on the net...
"Free music and intellectual property guerrillas" were NEVER -ever- the "heart" of the Net. That's just what the media was focused on because corporate monstrosities like the RIAA wanted it that way. These groups were the target-of-the-week, not the soul of something as vast and diverse and the internet.
Dot-coms were another popular media-target, just like hackers, activists, etc etc...
There is no "heart" of the internet. That's it's nature. It's like declaring something to be the heart of the world... or the heart of the universe.
It's too massive, too diverse, too all-encompassing to have just one central core culture. It's not just one big cafe with a bunch of fringe hangouts around it. It's millions of cafes, millions of obscure nodes, millions of opinions, thoughts, images, ones and zeros...
The heart of the net is the whole damn thing. It's not whatever bullshit the media lemmings are yapping about at the time.
every time this guy writes one of his ass columns, I get to read 100 funny flames about what an idiot he is.
And let me say again: what a load of horseshit. As someone who's been involved with the net long before Katz heard the word 'modem' (much less understood it), I can say unequivocally that there has never been a 'heart' as Katz defines it. In fact, the goddamned system was developed so that there could *be* no heart, technically speaking, and that same spec dominated all net-related interactions since the system began to take shape.
The press, in it's infinite stupidity, has many times in the past tried to characterize 'the Net' (with that capital 'N') as being defined by thing X, where thing X is the flashiest and simplest bauble that the press could find *and* understand. Note the last is especially critical, as the press is comprised of people possessing especially low IQs (we call them 'reporters') so they tend to gloss over or discard 95% of what they run into simply because they lack the brain cells to appropriately process the information. The other 5% they usually get wrong.
What the press refuses to accept is that the internet has no center, no locus, either technically, socially, intellectually, or in any other way you can think of. It never has, even back in the bad old days when it belonged to college students who made a hobby, and sometimes a career, of hacking the system while the 'academics' took credit for their innovations.
What Katz talks about has nothing to do with the net and instead has everything to do with the media perception of the net. This media perception has *always* been horribly wrong, in both its assumptions and its conclusions. Here, the assumption being that there is a heart (there isn't) and that this press-inspired delusion has been dominated at various times by groups that never truly existed or never wielded any real power.
What this piece boils down to is yet another whining, self-masturbatory exhibition of baseless assumptions and lies presented as facts. Virtually every line of Katz's article contains something patently false or ludicrous, tripe that only a reporter or a technophobic Boomer could buy into. In fact, the article is so full of shit that my original plan - to refute the statements individually - would haven taken several times the space of the article itself.
Perhaps Jon should give up writing on something he so very clearly knows nothing about. It's getting bloody tired, especially on a site that supposedly caters to the more technically-inclined. Jon clearly couldn't find his ass with both hands, so why is he posting articles on a technology which defies his ability to understand it? Enough is enough, already - hire someone who has at least a glimmering of a clue.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The "Information Superhighway"!
...I've got some lint in my navel.
Katz is displaying the same faulty logic that the "the-internet-is-bad-because-it-contains-pornograp hy" people use -- mistaking the messenger for the message.
It's a means of communication! That's it! What you do with it is up to you, and whether it be good or bad, the medium is more than happy to receive it.
We are not part of some great collective consciousness, anymore than we were when the television came out. Or the telephone. It's a good thing Katz wasn't around when the phone came along -- he'd probably be out dancing around a pole.
Isn't it funny how you can instantly pick a katz article from the first line of the post, without even glancing at the author name. Only once have I been mistaken, when I picked a timothy post for a Katz, but overall it's pretty reliable.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Quit the whining. Anyone above room-temperature IQ can write long meaningless ramblings designed to provoke people, especially the /. crowd. Please go milk a senator instead, if you can get THEM to think, then we'll all be in awe and you won't be such a doofus anymore.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
... with one nit to pick.
>> The "Net" wasn't designed to be a "medium" of any sort, individualistic or not. It was simply a way for users of computer systems to access resources on other systems
Actually, the "Net" *is* a medium -- in that it is a means of mass communication (American Heritage Dictionary). Your second statement disagrees with your first.
As you say, though, the "Net" is not Individualistic. Nor does it express any sort of personality, any more than the US Postal Service does. It just passes data from one place to the other. This is what the hype-ers and the critics fail to see when they focus on the means of transportation rather than the message contained therein.
We have hearts that love to be next to another heart. Human use for air can be music, wich lives inside our heads. Culture, as in common knowledge. "Bad" uses of the internet are just noise, meaningless. The industry around it will soon disappear, transmuted to the next money vault. The internet is changing our life like rock and roll did, not by it's qualities, but by our willingness to embrace it and use it to get together, closer, less clicks away. Looks you are in a long winter mood. Come get some sun in Brasil, then go back to pushing some brain juice into this wonderfull street corner of yours. Saude!
{100% paranoia is not enough when you are 99.9% right}
Without Slashdot, there's nothing entertaining to do on the net since MMORPGS still suck balls.
:)
This is my company's site, just came online 2 days ago. If you want to market for me, you can make a percentage. This means you make anywhere between nothing and millions
www.richdate.com
God spoke to me
Wasn't the net supposed to be a distributed system with no single heart that can be taken out with a nuke?
As pious as this may sound (so please don't reply saying so), if you, by any chance, want to get with a very similar, very current fight, but this time with instant messaging, may I suggest downloading Trillian (for Windows), which connects to ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, and is trying to stay connecting to AIM.
http://www.trillian.cc/
http://www.ceruleansoftware.com/
And like Napster, these guys have vowed to not stop fighting. Though some of its users have already tired of getting kicked off and have went back to the AIM client already.
the heart of the net ? its in each and every one of us reading /. at 4.55 in the morning and then sleeping 3h to go to work !
:)
we are the net
Just reading that article was a cultural experience.
While it wasn't hard to remember its self description as the travelogue of a "hacker tourist" the article title "Mother Earth Mother Board" certainly didn't stick in the old memory.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
> much like the Fantastic Four escaping from the clutches of Mole Man.)
If you and three other crime fighters have *that* hard a time escaping from Hans Friggin' Moleman, maybe you should consider another profession.
Most of the examples Katz mentioned apply only to a limited demographic slice, if you will, of those who use the net now. It's quite possible that the net is too many things to too many different kinds of people for there to be any such thing as its heart. And you know what? This is a good thing. Ten years from now, the idea that there even could be a "heart" of the internet is probably gonna seem laughable.
That isn't to say that there isn't room for new technologies on top of the internet to shake things up a little. Look at the Napster/p2p revolution, for example. Shady business legally, to be sure, but a good wake up call for the record & movie industries, who after all have an entire business model whose obsolesence is now a Simple Matter of Bandwidth.
But if you want to find any kind of significant change in the character of the net, or better yet the net significantly changing society, the wealthy, industrial First World is probably the last place to look right now. What about the ~90% of the world on the other side of the (much-hyped) digital divide?
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
It's obvious isn't it? Over 500 posts and counting. I'm jealous. Nobody every flames me, I just get trashed in metamod.
he __IS__ both because god is everything mostly love!!!!!