Dream Walk: The Electronic Journal of DAHarrod

Flame (27-Mar-95): The Myth of the Information Revolution

I submitted the following for publication in Beacon, the monthy newsletter of Boston Mensa. A few days later, I heard Cliff Stoll (The Cuckoo's Egg) pedaling his latest novel, Digital Snake Oil , which pretty much says the same things for the same reasons. Digital Luddites beware - the Revolution has come - it is being conducted on-line even as we speak - you're either part of the solution, or part of the percipitate. -=DAH=-

I used to take pride in being a Computer Nerd. There was a thrill in the challenge that half of what I knew about my profession would be obsolete in five years. There was a feeling of success and accomplishment that in a country where a black man has to work twice as hard to get half as far, I had achieved an international reputation in a field that most people have never heard of.

A few years ago, the mark of a Real Cybernaut was an Internet e-mail address. (One of my current ones is "76234.510@compuserve.com".) They started showing up on business cards, and served to distinguish the professionals from the dilettantes. Now, you have to have your own World Wide Web home pages and a URL. (Mine is "http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/".)

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that all of this is pure, unadulterated b*ll sh*t.

Something happened in cyberspace a few months ago, an event that is probably as important as the invention of that "primitive, bulky, solid state device", the transistor. A freeware piece of software called Mosaic put a graphical user interface (GUI) on the Web, a previously unremarkable corner of the Internet. Since October, 1994, the size of the Web has been doubling every few weeks as more people set up their own home pages.

At first, I thought that it would have the same kind of impact on our society as Rural Electrification, but I'm now convinced that it's just a magnet for the same kind of nerds who hopped on the CB radio bandwagon a few decades ago.

Let's extrapolate some undocumented statistics from some well-documented ones. One third of the people who own VCRs don't know how to program them, and can't even set the clock on one. Most of the people employed in the computer industry do not own a Personal Computer. (Most Mensans don't own PCs, either.)

Most of the travelers on the infobahn do so from computers at their office or school, rather than paying the tolls themselves. Most of the computers sold today have built-in modems, but less than half of them are used, and those which are serve as FAX machines. This leads to the conclusion that most of the world's internauts are professionals and students, rather than just plain, simple folks like our neighbors.

So, where am I going with this? Well, in spite of all of the hype in the media, there is no Information Revolution going on! Oh, yes, there's a lot of information out there, and a lot of people are more productive by having access to it, but 98 percent of the population is neither participating nor deriving benefit from it.

While it may be comforting to know that the Congressional Record is now available on-line from any computer that can be connected to a telephone line, do you know anybody who would want to read it? While you're at it, how many people do you know who could connect to the URL and read it from home??

We're dealing with the old bell-shaped curve here, and my theory is that there are exactly as many people connected to cyberspace from home as there are people who do not have telephones in their homes. Hell, let's be generous and include the homeless in that group at the other end of the curve.

Think about it ... millions of people who own televisions do not own a telephone, because you can steal or "inherit" a TV, but a telephone requires a monthly outlay of cash. You can buy a TV for a lot less than a telephone would cost for a year.

That is the real problem with this so-called Information Revolution ... the only people being empowered by it are those who already have some power. Even when computers are as cheap as TVs, there are people who will have them but will still be isolated from participation because they still cannot afford to be connected.

You say that we can put them in public libraries and make them free to everyone? Well, are you going to pay the transportation costs for people to get to them? Not everyone is in walking distance to a public library. (And did you know that you must have proof of residence to get a library card?)

Because I call myself a computer professional, I recently upgraded my connection to cyberspace so that I could "crawl the Web," the next step up from "surfing the Net." I can't remember when I was more disappointed. Over half of the home pages I accessed were simply lists of the same URLs that I found on everyone else's home pages, giving them an "information content" of bupkiss.

This brings us to the second fallacy of the Information Revolution ... most of the lemmings flocking to the Web are not contributing anything, but simply hogging the bandwidth with copy&paste lists of lists of lists. It's a new form of electronic junk mail, and there's a new class of junkies out there who are spending a lot of time seeing who can make the biggest list of lists.

So, being a computer nerd is not nearly as much fun as it used to be. I've seen the future, and it's not very interesting. Just as cable and direct satellite TV have brought us hundreds of channels with nothing worth watching, the infobahn will simply consist of millions of users with nothing worth accessing, and the vast majority of the Great Unwashed Masses will continue to live unaffected by it all.

Let me simply conclude by saying that if you've been thinking about getting a computer so that you can participate in the so-called Information Revolution, take my advice and save your money for postage stamps -- you'll get a lot more out of writing letters to old school chums and relatives. Trust me, the New Frontier is really just another Vast Wasteland, but there are a lot of travel agents out there hoping to make some easy profits before the suckers wise up to the scam, and they're very aggressive about convincing you that if you not part of it, you're out of it.

Flame Off! -=DAH=- 27-Mar-95