Where is the Internet headed?
by Paramendra Bhagat
December 1, 1999
The Next Generation Internet: When The Internet Will Really Have Arrived by Paramendra Bhagat
The New Land by Paramendra Bhagat
Online for Summer 1999 by Paramendra Bhagat
Introduction
The Internet is headed literally everywhere as portrayed in the phrases the Web Lifestyle and the Web Workstyle. What has been happening in the field of Information Technology along with the promises for the near and the long term are fundamental as the Industrial Revolution, only much more profound, much more pervasive, much more rapid and much more instantaneously global. What has happened so far is but the tip of the iceberg. Much of what might happen in less than a decade is barely visible from where we stand. The emergent contours of cyberspace promise to redefine literally all aspects of human life in all corners of the planet. The new millennium promises to be a new one indeed.
(1) The Global Spread of the Internet
The Internet turns the world into a Global Village like no technology before it did. As long as you have Internet Access, you are a world citizen: any website anywhere is but a click away. 200 million people have access to the Internet worldwide, 56% of it in the U.S. and Canada and 23.5% in Europe. By the year 2001 60% of the pages on the web are projected to be in languages other than English. There is promise for wealth creation. Already the Internet is the most exciting segment of the U.S. economy. The software industry in India has been growing 50% a year - 3 of its 5 richest citizens are software entrepreneurs, holding promise the Global South might achieve the wealth of the West without trashing the planet: the software industry is squeaky clean.
Major technological breakthroughs are in the pipeline. What we have had so far can safely be labelled Internet 1.0. Softwares that will read handwriting and recognize voice are in the waiting. Imagine being able to communicate in real time over the Internet with someone who does not speak your language and happens to be in the other hemisphere. Instant messaging plus voice recognition plus text-to-speech capabilities plus translation software will result in real-time, interactive, multilingual intercoms. Wireless Internet access is the current buzz, especially with phones and Palm Pilots connected to the web. Kitchen appliances and cars might be next in line, as devices that have not yet taken shape.
With tens of companies lined up to send hundreds of satellites into orbit over the years, Internet access anytime, anywhere will likely emerge a reality sometime during the first decade of the new millenium. It might be a cheaper deal for many parts of the world that lack even the rudimentary infrastructure to forego the interim developments and shoot for the latest technology available. There might be a ready market with the globally-stretched corporations that might take advantage of the promised substantial increases in bandwidth and speed and the resultant ease with which text, graphics, voice and video might be transmitted that might make it possible for someone to be anywhere on the planet and still be able to collaborate on projects. Videophones and videoconferencing await broadband technology and, by some estimates, will become mainstream like e-mail, by 2003. The promise of voice-based e-mails, as different from the current text-based e-mails, through mobile phones connected to the web and hence without any use of the keyboard, will be a boon for the countless languages that exist today in spoken form only. Imagine heralding voice-recognition software that might make it possible to access the Internet without the use of the keyboard or the promise of offering Internet Access through the TV set millions of households already own in Asia, accompanied by voice e-mail. In most parts of the world, the Internet will take off not the keyboard, but voice-activated set-ups.
(2) The Journey to the Next Generation Internet
The Next Generation Internet, also known as Internet2, promises to be 20,000 times faster than what we have now. Cable modems and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) might be faster than the dial-up modems, but the real news is the Next Generation Internet that is in the making. A jump from a speed of 28 or 56 kilobytes per second to one gigabyte per second is enormous. A thousand kilobytes is one megabyte, and a thousand megabytes is one gigabyte. The Next Generation Internet promises video of a quality never seen before that will bring forth global multiparty videoconferencing and interactive distance learning. Imagine going online instead of to the local videostore to get the movie you might want to watch, only now, of course, you have access to a much, much wider collection.
(3) The Technological Promises in the Short and the Long
Run
The Internet is out to displace the PC operating system which displaced the mainframe computers in the early 1980s. The Internet sets the standards and protocols that provide grounds for plentiful innovation, individually and in collaboration. It is not possible to design a "Windows" for the Internet and hence there is room for limitless competition. Unlike Windows the Internet is not owned by anyone. By 2001 or 2002 non-PC devices are projected to overtake PCs in volume shipments.
Microsoft's Windows stands in a league of its own. In the late 1980s Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout, became worth a billion dollars for the first time and exclaimed he never expected to become a billionaire. Now he is moving towards a hundred billion. No wonder Windows has been labelled the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. Windows 2000 stands out in that a company - Microsoft - that woke up late to the Internet in 1995 is now marrying its prime product - Windows - to it. But after the recent legal blow Microsoft has weathered, chances are the grip of the PCs and Windows on the Internet will likely loosen measurably and Linux will emerge as a noticeable challenge to the Windows operating system. Like Widows followed DOS, some claim Linux will overtake Windows as the dominant OS (Operating System) in the prophesied post-PC era, but this is too early to declare the marginalization of Microsoft as a company and Windows as a product.
If the Windows has been a command economy, the Internet is like a free market: there is no central authority. The Internet has no set shape, size or complexity level. It is constantly evolving at a pace that has no prescribed pattern. Monopoly is not a possibility on the Internet.
XML-based changes underway should make navigating the Internet less frustrating than it is now even as it continues to grow exponentially with 100,000 pages added to it every hour. The Internet hitherto has relied extensively on HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, which decides how webpages are exhibited to the viewer, but it has also meant Search Engines can be frustrating inconveniences in that words on the pages are "dumb data" to the machines. XML, eXtensible Markup Language, an add-on to HTML, stands to add "labels" to webpages so that their content are no longer "dumb" and can be "read" by the Search Engines. That should make it possible that when you look for Victoria the queen, you are no longer shown pages on Victoria the waterfall. Turning the Internet into a more searchable medium with XML is likely to make it more user-friendly. XML holds enormous promises for e-commerce, both business to consumer and business to business, as metatags will make it possible to compare prices across stores on the web.
(4) The Promise of E-commerce
Just like the Television did not get rid of the radio, the Internet will co-exist with traditional ways of conducting business, but the shift is inevitably tectonic: the Main Street in the 50s, the malls in the 70s, and the superstores in the 90s. Only now it is Internet time. In 1998, the online business-to-business sales stood at $ 43 billion and the business-to-consumer sales stood at $7.8 billion. The respective figures for 2003 are projected at $1.3 trillion - larger than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries on the planet - and $108 billion. In 1997 only 10 million Americans had bought something over the Internet, in 1998 the figure stood at 17 million. In 1995 only 4% of the Americans used the Internet every day, in 1998 the figure stood at 25%. E-commerce will be no more than 6% of retail purchases by 2003. It is not the share but the pace of growth that is the real news.
Shopping is more than securing transactions: it is an experience. Consumer e-commerce will grow only if online shopping experiences emulate those offline, that is, if there is much greater interactivity, altogether possible, especially if there is a merger of Hi-Tech with Hi-Touch, and with the enormous increases in bandwidth that the Next Generation Internet promises.
(5) The Emergence of the Web Lifestyle and the Web Workstyle
The Internet will change the way we live, work, learn, shop, invest, entertain ourselves and access health care. The size of the U.S. education "industry" stands at $740 billion and that of the U.S. Health Care industry at $1.1 trillion, 13% of the GDP, a quarter of it administrative costs. Higher-resolution screens will make reading off them as plausible as reading off printed pages. The Internet promises a paradigm shift in the way we go about living our lives. The Web Lifestyle and the Web Workstyle are not Hi-Tech-No-Touch but rather Hi-Tech-Hi-Touch promises. The technology frees us to do what we do better as humans while taking care of the routine, mechanical operations. Unlike Television, the Internet puts the surfer at the center.
Conclusion
Fascinating as it is, the Internet is but technology, and that too with limitations. Artificial intelligence, no matter how advanced it gets, will have the feel of a machine even as it invades the home - more than 8 million home networks in the U.S. by 2002 - the workplace, the car and even the human body.
Although of help, technological sophistication and material prosperity are not the answers to the ancient hatreds and deep-felt schisms in human society which have to be dealt with in their own right. Promising as it is, the Information Age is not a cure-all, especially for the structural anomalies in society. The emergent technology can be put to use to uplift the impoverished and the marginalized but, left on its own, it will likely only widen the divide between the haves and the have-nots, be it in the United States or the world at-large.
The digital divide between the haves and the have-nots somewhat dampens the euphoria the technological breakthroughs in Information Technology generate.
A Latin American or an African American household is three times less likely to have Internet Access compared to Asian American and Pacific Islander households and two-fifths as likely as European American households. Between 1997 and 1998, the gap for Access between the highest and lowest income levels in the U.S. increased by 29%. Since 1994, the gap of ownership of computers between blacks and whites has widened by 62% even as computer prices have gone down. Even for people in the same income bracket, the urban population is 50% more likely to have access compared to the rural population.
More than 80% of humanity has never heard a dial tone. Less than 3% of the people worldwide have Internet Access, over 80% of them in North America and Europe. Africa has a population of 739 million, only a million of which is online. Only 1% of South Asia, home to 20% of humanity, is online. And there is the larger hurdle of illiteracy and lack of basic computer skills and the language barrier: 80% of the websites now are in English, a language understood by less than 10% of humanity.
But then Information Technology can empower those who might be in the thick of the social and political struggles to enhance the quality of life for the traditionally secluded in ways that could not have been imagined before. And because the Information Age places a high premium on lavish investments in human capital like no other prior focal economic framework did, it will hopefully provide a strong impetus to spread the promised prosperity wide and deep. Therein lies the promise of the new medium.
(Acknowledgments: This is a follow-up paper for my Summer 1999 Internship with Chaitime.com sponsored by Dr. Libby Jones and Dr. Jan Pearce and the Internship Office of Berea College. The Internship was landed with help from New York Times writer Lisa Napoli. A vote of thanks go also to Team Leader Arif Ullah, Team Members Amudha Poola and Priya Subrahanyam, Internship Co-ordinator Neeta Parikh, Content Producer Abeer Hoque, CEO Bhana Grover and all the rest of my colleagues at Chaitime who made it all possible and worthwhile. Thanks are due also to my friend Siddhartha Kumai in Philadelphia for helping me out with some of the practical details of spending the summer in the city.)
(A 15-minute presentation was made during the regular staff meeting of the Center for Effective Communication (CEC), Berea College, on December 2, 1999.)
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© 1999 Paramendra Bhagat