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Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

Apple fellow Alan Kay once said that technology is “technology” only for people who are born before it was invented. Twelve-year-old Niki Tapscott would agree. When asked if she would participate in a “consumer of the future” panel at a technology conference, she lectured her father: “Okay, Dad, I’ll do it if you want me to. But I don’t understand why you adults make such a big deal about technology. Kids just use computers to do stuff. We don’t think of them as technology. Like a fridge does stuff. It’s not technology. When I go to the fridge, I want food that is cold. I don’t think about the technology that makes food cold.”
Ironically, the Internet was created not by social visionaries but by cold warriors at the Department of Defense. The Internet was launched as a packet-switching system in 1969 for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), part of the Department of Defense, so that ARPA research sites could share information and give access to computers elsewhere. The model of the network was highly distributed rather than the current vogue—hierarchical—to enable easy re-routing of communications in the case of an attack. Electronic mail (e-mail) was a kind of add-on feature that allowed researchers to send messages to one another, and it quickly became among the most popular aspects of the system. Other outgrowths included electronic conferences and bulletin boards where messages, questions, comments, and other types of information are posted for anyone to read arid react to what’s going on in what has become known as cyberspace.
What ARPA was hying to do was connect users without wonying about how many networks were involved or how the connections were made. It has become a network of networks that allows global access to computers and databases as diverse as the Library of Congress all the way to little- known publishers. Because the Internet consists of local telephone systems, all of them interconnecting, it’s particularly helpful when long distance lines are out. In the hours following the January 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, the Internet and other on-line systems all reported high usage because they were working when other connections weren’t. Prodigy (a joint venture between IBM and Sears Roebuck and Co.) had its second busiest day when users, hungry for up-to-date information, plugged in and worried relatives posted notes on electronic bulletin boards looking for loved ones. There were 813,000 log-ons compared with 890,000 on Bill Clinton’s election day, about one third more than a typical day. Another service, GEnie, saw use double in the twenty-four hours following the first shocks. During the early days of the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the Internet offered the only accurate information.
An offshoot are “freenets,” another way of thinking globally, acting locally. In their simplest form, freenets are just electronic bulletin boards, usually organized to serve one city or small region, that let individuals send electronic mail to one another without going, in the jargon of the users, F2F (face-to-face). E-mail is already doing for the modem world what the British Post Office did in the eighteenth century when the rates were made standard. Could there be a modem parallel to the strength of industrial Britain as a result of regularizing the cost of communicating the written word?
Originally, the most popular use for the Net was e-mail and what might be called “chat,” that is, practical pursuits. Corporate e-mail systems are now changing the way that many companies communicate and work. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, says that Sun’s 13,000 employees send or receive, on average, about 1.8 million electronic mail messages per day. That’s an average of over 135 per person per day. People wasting time, you say? Well, somehow working this way works. Pound per pound, Sun is one of the most profitable companies on Earth. Now e-mail systems are being hooked up to the Internet, expanding the addressable population from a company’s employees to the tens of millions of Net users. These days, a business card without a Net address is seen as a sign that you’re some kind of Jurassic manager.
Beyond e-mail, a new world of applications is opening up. If a city agency has decided to put a contract out for tender, the specifications can be posted on the Net. That means a contractor doesn’t need to dispatch an employee to pick up a thick document from city hail. The contractor can simply call up the contract, capture it in the company’s own system, and read it whenever the need strikes. When the time comes for the contractor to put in a bid, the return trip is just as easy. Author Stephen King marketed a short stoiy, Utney’s Last Case, by putting it on the Internet, thus giving electronic nomads a free read. For the rest of the stories in the collection, Nightmares and Dreainscapes, the nomads phoned or sent a fax (with credit card number) to a designated bookstore.
Before the Gulf War, linguist George Lakoff placed some interesting new analogies on the Internet for discussion. He was concerned about the analogies being drawn between Saddam Hussein and Hitler, so he asked a series of questions about the Hussein-as-Hitler metaphoL His thinking quickly spread and became part of the fabric of the discussion, a way of elevating the tone of the debate and placing modem times in a lustoric context. Yet, there is another point here—access to the thinking was widespread. Lakoff’s thesis wasn’t published in some learned magazine with small circulation or delivered at a think-tank gathering of like-minded souls. The Internet set the tone for the debate.