181–190 of 204 posts
It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 19…
Mix in the fact that there was a trend of children making headlines for breaking into various high-tech or secretive areas, and it seemed more like something that didn't have much cause to be respected.
Is there anything like Tomorrow’s World today?
Maybe it's nostalgia, but there's something calming about CRTs...
It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 19…
I think Bowie's prediction for the impact of the internet was not too far off the mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU
This is consistent with Bowie's genius to be more an early adopter type than a visionary type. A hell of an early adopter.
Funny to see the BBC complaining about "letting the market forces" build the internet. The said market forces didn't do too bad.
Considering that ARPANET and CERN were both government funded, I’d say market forces had little to do with it.
While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as be…
> Early Internet still reflected that world order. Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party. I think you're conflating people from that world order and how they interpreted the internet, with how the internet actually was. > User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.…
Those corporations dominated the Internet. It was NYT et al who was doing the publishing and the users doing the reading. Large, incumbent corporations dominated online sales.
That they were slow to react to the changes and therefore the user-driven Internet eventually took over from them for that reason do not change the fact that the early Internet was literally a one-way street.
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> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as be…
Exactly the opposite of this happened. Almost all content on the early-mid 90s web was user-generated. The bulk of it was personal "homepages" with low production values describing hobbies or technical interests. Very few large corporations had even heard of this crazy new "Internet" thing in the 90s, and even fewer cared. Almost none had a corporate webpage even listing their address and phone number, much less prod…
I guess its because I combined content creation + publication under the title 'content that people are misunderstanding.
Large companies created the content, they published it, they dominated the views. The user generated content being seen by a few hundred people a month in a forum or a personal homepage on the fringes of the Internet did not make any dent in their monopoly at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as be…
"Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products." I would say that describes the online world now, not at the internets adoption in 1990s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As early as 2003, popular culture was catching on to the fact that the ‘information superhighway’ had some potholes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
Issues with the Internet date to its origins ... and inventors. Paul Baran in the 1960s, amongst others, whom I've compiled here: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193 > Sources / instances date to the 1980s or earlier, addressing specifically the false assertion by many that "nobody saw this coming".
https://www.tor.com/2009/06/11/the-net-of-a-million-lies-ver...