Overnight, practically, the World Wide Web has pervaded every nook and cranny of our lives. Don’t believe it? Repeat after me:
Microfilm.
It boggles the mind, but microfilm is where we went for answers, B.G.
Before Google. And before Wikipedia. And before the Web.
To see how far we have come in 10 short years, ask your librarian to thread some spooled plastic film through the microfilm reader – that whiny, lumbering mechanical beast – and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y rewind back to 1995. (Don’t attempt this on your own; microfilming is a job for professionals.)
That was the year nongeeks began thinking of the Web as something other than a place for spiders and superheroes. Netscape, which offered a tool for “browsing” this Web, went public and made a lot of people rich.
Microsoft declared war on Netscape with a browser of its own. Sun Microsystems served up Java, a language for programming cool stuff on the Web. Amazon.com and eBay married “e-” to commerce.
Those were primitive days, as the scratchy black-and-white magazine pages spooling through the Mesozoic microfilm machine will attest. Most personal computers tiptoed online with poky 14.4-baud modems; $3,000 might buy a PC with an “ultrafast” 28.8-baud upgrade. CompuServe (anyone remember that dial-up service?) still tacked fees onto e-mails from nonsubscribers and saddled members with long strings of numbers for e-mail addresses.
Business Week touted “Web Navigators” Lycos, WebCrawler and InfoSeek – even though the last charged 20 cents per lookup. For $29 a year, a service called “r.u. there?” offered to let people “converse by exchanging snippets of text almost instantly, in a “real-time’ conversation,” the magazine reported.
Nowadays, of course, kids start to IM sometime between their first “mama” and “dada.” Thanks to the Web, you can buy a car, learn guitar, trade stocks and get a mortgage or a date without ever leaving your easy chair. Or book a dream vacation online and, with a cell-cam, beam video of swaying palm trees to envious workmates while you tan.
Which all seems pretty close to what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind in 1989 when he proposed the Web.
Seeking a way “to help people work together,” he devised a set of protocols for sharing information via the Internet, then a province of academics. In “Weaving the Web,” the British physicist describes struggling to name his baby. He toyed with Mesh, MOI (Mine of Information) and TIM (The Information Mine). Imagine logging onto the “Enquire Within Upon Everything.”
By any name, the Web failed to excite his employers at a Swiss physics lab.
Was their indifference justified? Has the Web improved our lives?
That’s almost like debating the merits of air. Dirty or clean, there’s no living without it. It’s everywhere.
This transformation has happened with a sneaky swiftness akin to the arrival of a child. Parents know life existed before it happened; they just have trouble remembering it. Mostly, they suspect Junior has changed them for the better, and they wouldn’t really want to go back. Which is just as well since going back is not an option.
Like anything conceived by humankind, the Web comes with trade-offs.
The government estimates retail e-commerce sales topped $21 billion during the second quarter of this year. That’s good. Consumer Reports, on the other hand, estimates that more than 2 million children nationwide have stumbled upon pornographic spam. Web-borne viruses and spyware have inflicted more than $9 billion of damage on the computing public, the magazine says.
Wireless networks, text messaging, Treos, Blackberrys – all use Web technology to untether us from the office. Which means … we bring the office everywhere. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell blames info overload for an energy-sapping “Attention Deficit Trait.”
Today, anyone can be a broadcaster (podcaster) or journalist (blogger). But how many future presidential hopefuls will be derailed by the Wayback Machine? Think twice before posting a frat-house rant or an indiscreet JPEG photo on MySpace. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Christie says the Golden Rule for the Patriot Act era is: “Your e-mail will outlive you.”
E-mail is hard to beat for staying in touch. Yet there was something special about Grandma’s letters, so lovingly penned, with their crisp $5 bills for midterm pizzas. (Do grandmothers use PayPal now?)
Webcamming with distant friends is a kick, even if the video looks like it’s from Mars. Watching innocent victims beheaded on the Web is sickening at any resolution.
The Sept. 11 terrorists used the Web. That’s the worst trade-off of all.
John Perry Barlow, cyber-libertarian and Grateful Dead songsmith, says it’s a shame having Osama bin Laden in the electronic neighborhood. But he thinks it’s a price worth paying for a Web “where anybody can learn and have access to all the world’s knowledge, no matter how much money they have, where anybody can think their own thoughts and enrich those thoughts with all that’s come before them.
“That’s a world worth taking a risk for,” Barlow says.
One thing’s for sure: The Web beats the microfilm. No contest.
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