From Internet-on-a-Disk #10, March/April 1995
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A few years ago, the Internet was like the Rainman -- an autistic idiot-savant. It contained an incredible wealth of facts in its global "brain," but there was no built-in way to associate one piece of information with another or to find what you wanted when you wanted it.
With the coming of gopher and then the World Wide Web, one site or document could link to another site or document. This added a whole new power of association -- so long as the people who ran the various sites knew about related material elsewhere and went to the trouble to insert pointers. In cases, where a community of scholars made full use of this capability, it was possible to follow your threads of thought from one document to another, taking advantage of these previously planted associations.
It was that stage of technology that gave rise to the concept of electronic "malls." The manager of a Web site could help guide the interests of the user by constructing sets of menus. The cyber visitor would come looking for one kind of information and see offerings of commercial enterprises listed in the same menu. This was association by proximity. And retailers hoped to attract on-line customers based on old mall-type business models. Indeed, a year ago, O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator or GNN (http://www.ora.com) was probably the best starting point on the Web.
Today we see search tools adding to the associative power of the Internet. Today Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) is probably the best starting point -- with nowhere near as much work involved as a site like GNN. The concept was simple -- let people who run Web sites submit information about their pages; keep it all in a database; and use readily available search tools to let people find what they want. The students at Stanford who created and run that site also offer a hierarchy of menus as an added help.
Meanwhile, the Britannica On-Line project (http://www.eb.com) uses a search mechanism (WAIS) to make its full content readily accessible. It also is designed so the reader can click on any word in an article and immediately get the dictionary definition of that word.
And now a company called Infoseek has added a new dimension ( http://www.infoseek.com:80/Home ). They index World Wide Web pages, usenet newsgroups (over 10,000 of them), the full text of over 50 computer newspapers and magazines, and the major news services (Reuters, Associated Press, Businesswire, PR Newswire, and the Newsbytes News Network). In response to your queries, you get a hypertext list of article titles. When you click on the one you want, you get the full text right away. Unlike Yahoo, you have to pay for this service. But if it saves you time, or you find an important item that otherwise you wouldn't know about, it's well worth the money. (In an ideal world, all information would be available on-line and free; and we would, as in this case, pay to get less -- to get exactly what we want when we want it.)
We expect to see even more powerful tools that will help novice users quickly find the Web site or the particular piece of information they need, without the need for an orderly superstructure, such as a mall or a television-style network. Such tools will be able to interpret content, to highlight main points, to do some basic language translation, and to automatically generate summaries to help us cope with the huge amounts of information available. Instead of picking the right on-ramp with the right selection of menu choices as signs to guide you, you'll use search and directory tools. And as a next step, based on such tools, it will be possible to have your own individual home page generated for you on the fly, tailored to a profile of your interests.
So we see the Internet rapidly developing associative powers that make metaphors from the traditional world of business seem irrelevant. With these tools, users are actively in control -- seeking what they want and getting it without intermediaries. The Internet increasingly becomes an extension of your own mind, building on your natural powers of association. In this kind of environment, location -- in time or space -- means nothing. Here the user is creator, not consumer.
Today, attracted by the media hype which they themselves help to spread, mega-infotainment companies are anxious to move into the Internet and "own" it. Such companies presume that because of the compelling content that they already own, they have a natural advantage here. They anxiously anticipate ever greater video capability. They expect that the business models that helped them dominate elsewhere will succeed here as well.
Some have already begun to mimic their print publications on the Web, and others are looking at the Internet as just another broadcast medium -- another way to deliver the same content to the same passive audience. Of course, they'll add some "interactive" elements as an enticement, but basically they still think that this is Kansas. They haven't woken up to the fact that they are entering Oz.
Will they win? Anything is possible. But the Internet is the natural home of the small and nimble, who feed on dinosaur eggs.
That's the favorite breakfast food in Oz.
PS -- Censorship, as an abridgement of freedom of expression, is marginally acceptable in a broadcast medium, where the choices of a few producers are imposed on many consumers. In that case, censorship can be seen as protecting the rights of consumers, so long as it actually reflects their desires. But in a medium where the individual has total control, and makes individualized choices among millions of files, and where anyone can be a creator/producer, censorship makes no sense at all. When the Internet becomes an extension of my mind, censoring the Internet is like trying to censor my thoughts. And no government should ever get into that business.
In other words, the same misunderstanding that is leading mega-media companies to rush into the Internet business is leading government to try to control Internet content.
When will they realize that this isn't Kansas?
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