The Internet is, if you think about it, quite an amazing thing. First of all, it's the first multimillion-patron entity that's built by the whole world, people of all interests and skills and from all walks of life. You can help construct this growing, metamorphosing mammoth no matter who you are. All you need is the equipment: some rather inexpensive machinery in fact, if one were to compare a computer and modem to, say, a parts factory in the backyard if everyone were contributing to the building of a car. Secondly, it is, as I've stated before, making the world smaller and smaller. This is what humans do with their technology, and it's simultaneously marvelous and frightening: We make facts, materials and media instantly accessible and we can meet new people halfway around the world, drawing ourselves together like an unexpected globewide peace summit.
The third amazing thing about the Net, especially bewildering when taken into context with the previous two points, is that IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY EXIST. What we "surf" around (groan) is actually just a bunch of zeroes and ones whizzing through telephone lines; there's nothing static, no huge computer somewhere representing THE INTERNET BASE or anything. What we call the Internet is actually more of a widely accepted series of telecommunication protocols than a tangible body. It's therefore ironic that it's the most organic, shifting, consistently growing object to either 1. become so mind-bogglingly popular or 2. not actually exist.
Sure, there are major ways of accessing all of these zeroes and ones, this worldwide network. But this prominence is based on shrewd business, foresighted marketing and smart promotion. America Online or the Microsoft Network didn't invent the web any more than CompuServe or Prodigy invented the idea of special-interest bulletin boards. They're just two of the manifold ways of diving into the Internet, much like Explorer and Navigator are just two of the nearly infinite windows through which to see and use it. Even the Worldwide Web doesn't encompass everything on the Internet; only, at the moment, a big chunk of it.
Your medium doesn't matter, then. Returning to the car analogy, your local freeway doesn't offer different roads depending on the type of car you're driving. We can all get to the same zeroes and ones, and we can all add to them, and what this enormous, breathing, interconnected, nonexistent web of people's creative and industrial spills represents no matter how you reach it is a shrinking not only of the distance between you and a bit of information or you and another part of the world, but also a diminishing of the effort required of previously manual functions.
This makes the Net an excellent model for the entire electronics industry as it has now come to exist: Previously non-electronic tasks have been made much easier and more expedient by crossing over into bits and bytes. Telecommunicating is only part of it; writing something, designing something and even learning something have become computer-based activities for millions of people, making them much more at-hand accomplishments. Like the shrinking world, this is both fantastic and disconcerting. Add a laptop computer into the equation and we have portable ease with which to do all of these things.
For the first few years during which the Net was a household topic, you needed an actual computer to access it; modems weren't common purchases along with laptops yet. When things like the portable IBM 286 (and its clones, of course) and Apple's PowerBook (wieldy Macintosh) were made available, it became possible to dial-up your local server and check your e-mail or connect to the Net from restaurants, airplanes and even the damn beach if you wanted to.
All you need is a portable phone: Soon we'll all be plugged into each other, immediately available from anywhere. Laptops get smaller and smaller (ever see the palmtop computer the Psion?) and will eventually replace pagers and whatnot.
This constant-availability likelihood is both an attractive and an annoying prospect. I mean, sure, it will make things easier, but it will take the mystery and (for lack of a better word) romance out of meeting new people, or at least give it an entirely different kind of excitement.
I used to sit down and write letters to friends. I like writing. I like fooling with language. It's fun for me. But I realized that to get most people to write back, I was going to have to allow my recipients to bypass the physicality of replying. I was going to have to purge them of the chores of handwriting, finding an envelope, sticking a stamp on it and walking it to the mailbox. So I obtained an e-mail address, which of course also came in handy for readers' comments and questions once I discovered the Net's potentially huge audience and started my various sites.
After a couple years of these facilities for instantaneous communication, I myself have found it increasingly arduous to write using my hand. This is coming from a guy who (voluntarily) spent his childhood with pens and notebook paper. Most letters I type nowadays, even to people to whom I'm just going to hand the pages, are typed on a word processor. Ditto for ideas for new projects that I could just take a few minutes to jot down. This is mainly because it's possible to lose a piece of paper, whereas a file saved on a hard disk and a backup disk can always be re-summoned.
There's been secured a fusion between my brain and fingers that makes the thoughts flow without the supposed burden of hand movement, especially at a fast typing speed. There's less time for reflection between written words, less time for rhetorical and structural planning, but then the word processor has a DELETE key.
Someone outfitted with a laptop computer containing a modem and a word processor has taken the incidental part of his work out of tons of things. A really positive angle on this is that it might encourage kids to write. It's not as much of a chore now, especially if you figure-in the "playing with a toy" nature still redolent in electronics for most of us. The task of physically turning thoughts into words will be further alleviated by the upcoming mass advent of these new voice-recognition programs (such as Dragon's Naturally Speaking for minimum 32 MB/133 MHz PCs). All of this human-effort-truncation is definitely where we're headed on a widespread basis. The pro side of this has been made obvious; but what about the down side?
I'll start on that cheerful prospect with an illustrative example concerning this newsletter. I'm typing this article in Excellence!, a word-processing application that runs quickly and smoothly on my Amiga. Once I open the program that I use to typeset this newsletter, Pagestream, I can import this text into the preset columns because Pagestream recognizes Excellence! files. I don't even have to convert the text to ASCII, the every-computer-knows-it code for the alphabet etc. Text saved as an ASCII file (i.e. with .TXT as the extension on its name) can be read by any computer no matter which one it was written on, provided the Disk Operating Systems -- DOSs -- are friendly with each other, or have been forced into a friendship with extra utilities.
Now for all I know, Adam's writing an article himself at the moment. If he is, he's most likely using his laptop IBM, typing it in Microsoft Word. If this is the case, he'll save his work as an ASCII file on a 3 1/2" diskette, which he'll simply hand over to me so I can load it into Excellence!. I'll then save it as an Excellence! file instead of an ASCII file so I can import it into Pagestream as usual.
I could name several other examples, but the point is that our creative outgrowths are composed of text that is fully transportable, no matter what application it's typed in or what's used to read it. Likewise for e-mails that your friends send you wishing you a happy birthday, or for that matter, images, downloaded off a website, that you think your girlfriend might like; you could view them using any paint program if they're .JPG files, .GIFs or even .TIFFs. It brings up the question of treasuring each other's thoughts and sentiments. The words we put together become less valuable -- disposable, even.
It also poses the risk of making us perceive each other, in the abstract anyway, as files or addresses. Being able to communicate with another person was, at one time, very special: a long-distance call, a car trip, a long letter with maybe a poem. Now we can access each other just by knowing e-mail addresses. Someone sitting on a bus on her way to work can e-mail her husband, or if he's planning on stopping at the store, she can call him on a cellular phone and immediately be with him, not necessarily to be sweet but rather to get incidental contact out of the way. I'm not saying that taking trips to visit people will be a thing of the past, but with the arrival of video phones, it won't be quite as necessary or special.
We can save each other's communiques alongside puzzle games and spreadsheets; we just assign each other to drawers and file-name extensions.
We're already numbers to the government, folks. We're already file names to the corporations we patronize. Let's try to retain some semblance of endearment and personality, huh? Let's be happy about what we're achieving, but let's be careful as well. As long as we're aware of every technological step we're taking, staying skeptical of advertising and remaining detached enough (and reliant enough on our own built-in computers) to know the difference between advantageous and thoroughly desirable inventions, and cold, superfluous ones that render us subhuman. Are we smart enough to remain aloof to our own devices? Well, how about this: Are you? -- CF