Looking Back at 1995 and “The Internet? Bah!”
This morning, Bill Drew re-tweeted about an opinion piece from Newsweek, originally published in 1995, from Clifford Stoll, and reprinted in its entirety at the blog Three Word Chant . Copyright issues aside, this mildly curmudgeonly piece about "this most trendy and oversold community" makes some spectacularly wrong predictions, but manages to nail some of the issues that we’re still grappling with 15 years later.
no online database will replace your daily newspaper.
Ouch! This turns out to be completely untrue. In 2010, newspapers and news organizations are downsizing staff, reconfiguring jobs, and trying to figure out the right mix of free vs. paid for their online content. Also, you might just become your daily newspaper; there is a role for the citizen journalist. This year, the prestigious George Polk awards honored the anonymous poster of the video capturing the shooting death of Neda Agha-Soltan, because "in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cell phone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news".
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers over the Internet. Uh, sure.
Nicholas Negroponte went on to head One Laptop Per Child, which empowers children to learn and express themselves through the use of rugged, low-cost, connected hardware and software.
Anyone else remember the initial grandiose claims of netLibrary? Their soaring vision of the world’s knowledge in ebook form was at odds with their actual early content, which was Bartleby plus a few guidebooks, government handbooks and social science texts. Things have changed quite a bit in the last decade though, both for Netlibrary and for ebooks in general. Owners of Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Nobles’ Nook now have instant wireless access to many front- and backlist ebook titles.
Take a look at 1995, the year that the DVD format was announced, the WTO was formed, Yahoo! was founded, OJ was acquitted, and the Oklahoma City bombing occurred.
What are today’s curmudgeonly predictions? And what events from 2010 will resonate into the future?
