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eftychia at 07:27am on 2003-05-20Hmm. Timing. A couple days ago I posted my little rant about how spam was destroying the usefulness of email as a tool. Just now I stumbled across a Utopia With Cheese item from yesterday, quoting an article in The Register about how "The Internet is dying" (yeah, yeah, I know, "Death of the net predicted, film at 11, old news before the Internet was the Internet, but bear with me -- they don't literally mean the whole net) because "for most people, many of whom are your friends and relatives [...] [the Internet] represents a perfect tragedy of the commons. Email is all but unusable because of spam." And: "Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements." (There's more to the Register article...)
The point the Register article reaches is, "What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that 'freedom' in itself is a justification for this information pollution. It's probably reached a tipping point: the signal to noise ratio is now too low." [Emphasis added by me.] Note that for it to be "universal", it does have to work effectively for people not sufficiently tech-savvy to install their own pop-up-stoppers (and just turning off JavaScript brings its own problems -- I'm writing more and more "you lost a reader because I can't navigate your site" letters to webmasters who rely on JavaScript for basic navigation), not just us folks who can write or download new tools in the arms race against spammers.
Personally, I'm mostly still at the bitching and whining stage more than the announcing-the-end stage, but I must say, I'm discouraged. The question is, is there anything we can do at this point?
(no subject)
El Reg.
If anything, the net's been improving over the last few years. Standards-compliant web-design is growing as a meme. Spam- and popup-filters are ubiquitous amongst geeks, and edging towards the mainstream. Google continues to Just Work. The dotcoms have died made way for people who are actually interested in providing real value.
I'd be optimistic.
From my perspective...
But then there are people like my grandmother.
When I lived with her in the mid 90s, she had an IBM AT -- no mouse, command-prompt driven. Shortly after I moved out, she got a new Dell. After she moved to NC several years ago, she signed up with AOL. A couple years ago, she got fed up with AOL not being all it's cracked up to be and found herself a different provider. Her impetus for learning to use that Dell was a card game, Ada Towers, that I found and installed for her in a quick web-search. She has gone from computer-phobe to computer-phile, and understands the bloody things better than a lot of the people around me at work. (She understands that when you tell a computer to do something, it does exactly what you tell it to. The number of people who don't grok this is stunning.)
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the people who are prophecizing the end of the Internet are full of hogwash and hot air. The Web, at least, goes through phases; we are currently in a relatively educated phase, and I think we've got all the "blithering idiot" stages behind us.
The 'Net and Web are still just baby-steps past their infancy, and are only just beginning to realize that they have true potential. IMO, the globalization of computers will continue until they're a lot more solidly integrated into our lives; in the US, it's weird if you don't have running water. Eventually, it'll be weird if you don't have a 'net connection in the house.
(no subject)
I agree that the SNR has dropped, or is about to drop, below an acceptable level for the tech-non-savvy. On the other hand, said SNR also changes from person to person, and while it might have reached the non-negotiable point for those who do have the tools and knowhow to combat them a wwhile ago, maybe it still hasn't gotten to the same point for those that are willing to accept it as a pfact of life.
For me, whose main brush with pop-ups are limited to when I visit my spambait web mail site and half.com---and yet I can surf expansively and get quite a bit done on the WWW, and whose e-mail, while getting spam, gets nowhere near the 12-to-1 you quoted (I guess I'm lucky), the SNR is still rather high. I have this vision that in the worst case scenario, if a large number of people leave as they have flocked online, there is still going to be the core who will exchange opinion and information pretty much the same way they have since the early 80s. This will not be the desirable outcome---The Internet could free minds, and in that case it will not have the chance to---
...but, come to think of it, everyone who's experienced the mind-broadening effect of the Internet were people who were prepared and willing to, anyway.
I would like to be not social Darwinist, but I can't seem to get away from it in this instance.
I do not intend to stop fighting against spam and popups, for the record. I still scream "Mozilla" to whoever I can, forex.
Hmmm.
Anyway, this was a very thoguht-provoking entry. Mind if I link it from my own jounral, so that some of the people on my friends list might also get to it?
(no subject)
"Mind if I link it from my own jounral, so that some of the people on my friends list might also get to it?"
Of course I don't mind -- link away.
(no subject)
I have a spare cheap dialup isp which does not require you to install cranky, buggy software.
Although my primary account is still with AOSmell, I mainly use if for e-mail and newsgroups. Who cares about their content? Most times it's available on the web faster and cheaper anyways.
I run Opera with pictures off. Most of the time, I don't want to look at those 'pretty pictures' or snazzy graphics. Most of them are ads anyway. Besides, if I wanted to look at pictures I'd watch television. :-P
Munge those email addresses.
Most people still are on dialups. Most people still use computers that are 2 to 5 years old. If your website takes forever to load, who's going to bother?
The Internet is changing as we speak. Knowledge is power. Cool programs to handle spam, viruses and pop-ups can be found with a little digging. And many of them are free:
f-prot for virus scanning
Zone Alarm for firewall
Popcorn for e-mail.
(Want more? www.tinyapps.org)
And until I have cheap reliable broadband, some sites will be ignored. I can deal with that. I don't care if they can't.
-m
(no subject)
Popups don't bother me much anyway, as I use iCab, Safari, and Lynx nearly exclusively these days.