I happened to attend the Push Technology Summit in San Diego last April. I was strictly part of the entertainment package and contributed nothing to the information flow whatsoever. (He said proudly.)
But I did become aware of a unique new skill. When one presenter stepped up to his machine, a guy next to me whispered: Oh, great! He's an awesome demo-er. Another presenter was introduced as a demo god.
A demo god, as I understand it, is a combination of supersalesman, pyrotechnician, code monkey supremo, marketing hoo ha, and the Supreme Being Himself, unencumbered by theology, his wide sails filled with the breezes of an unfettered free market.
And some of these guys and products were pretty impressive. There was a voice recognition system, for example, by means of which you could retrieve messages by shouting at an artificial intelligence over your flip phone. I find that a little notebook with phone numbers entered by pen in alphabetical order does the trick just fine, and unless I misplace the notebook, I never have to worry about lost data, but certainly the idea of shouting at an artificial intelligence on a cordless does have enormous appeal.
The thing that depressed me about the convention was the relentless practicality of the products being pushed. A DOOM like video technology, for example, was touted as a tool for real estate agents to allow home buyers to tour a house over the Internet. Cool, yes, but why? Are home buyers and agents too damn lazy to hop in the car and check out the house in person? Can we punch a hole in the wall of this virtual house? Can we set fire to the couch? No? Then what good is it?
All of these things, of course, work fine up there on the podium. As we all know from personal experience, once they enter your system, they will only work after twelve ritual sacrifices have been made to the gods of tech support.
Then there's push technology itself. As I understand it, this is a desperate new business model, x in a series of attempts to make money off the Internet. It's kind of like email or a magazine subscription. You pay a fee, and every day, or once a week, or once a month, your horoscope, sports stats, stock quotes, or Dilbert will slide onto your desktop without benefit of browser.
Again, this could be cool. But I want all of these things to go away if I shout at them. As it stands now, every time I scream at my computer, nothing happens at all. That's not right. You kidding me? With today's technology? That's just not right.
When baseball player Cal Ripken wanted a web site, he found that calripken.com was taken, registered by a wily entrepreneur named Scott Bannister who's been hoarding domain names, like a ten year old girl with beanie babies.
He offered to sell the name to Ripken for ten g's, but Ripken went for 2131.com instead. That's the number of consecutive games he played to set a major league record, by the way, not the number of number of consecutive times he failed to log on to AOL.
This is a brand new profession. Cybersquatting, it's called, and an attractive name it is. Cybersquatting. What a pleasant image it conjures in the mind.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Some speculators...sit on the names until they get a call from someone wanting to buy one. Others list their properties with online brokerages....
To combat this problem, it was agreed at an Internet convention in Geneva to expand the number of Web addresses. An international consortium plans to issue seven new suffixes: dot firm, dot store, dot web, dot arts, dot rec, dot info, and dot nom.
A domain name broker in New York doubts that this will put him out of business though. He said, Dot com is king, and it is unlikely that this will change.
Dot com is king. Now there's a statement that could not have been made twenty years ago.
But I don't think the experts went far enough. There's a lot of guys named Bob out there. Can't we group them together under dot Bob? Ditto for dot dotty, for all the Dorothys in cyberspace who pine for a web site. Hey, we're not in Kansas any more. Flamers, naysayers, and cynics could assemble at dot not, dot doubt, or dot suck. Suck, I believe, is the most common word on the World Wide Web.
As even the most neophyte surfer knows, the Web is full of sites that have no value whatever. A guy lists all of his record albums, another guy has a list of all the tee-shirts he owns, with detailed descriptions, there are dozens that say something like, Sorry this site sucks right now, come back again later. There's the site with the pictures of the guy setting barbecue coals afire with liquid oxygen, the little black helicopter page, and the endless exposes of a sinister alien presence among us. These could all be assembled under dot what?
As for me, I pledge to not have a web site at all, until I learn the truth about flying saucers. I do however own bob dot com. Bob, if you're listening, send me a buck, pal, and it's yours. I gotta go.
I don't know about you, but I often receive email with 3D animations attached, screen savers, little movies, html links, or three hundred page documents with full color illustrations, graphs, and formats worthy of the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair. Of course, they all take fifteen to twenty minutes to download, and then require some plug and play which I have to download, try and get to work for an hour, give up, throw everything in the trash, and email the senders back to tell them to describe to me, please, in thirty words or less, what exactly it is I would have seen, had I had the ability to see it.
Email and word processing are mainly what I have my computer for. I have been sneeringly accused of persisting in viewing the computer as a typewriter. That's valid. But it's more than that. It's also a huge filing system. I frankly don't care about crappy little videos, cheesy little animations, zippy yet strangely generic graphics, teleconferencing, or any of the other bells and whistles to which the virtual domain is prey. I'm not an animator, musician, video artist, entrepreneur, programmer, producer, or vice president, I'm not into marketing, I'm a writer. I spend eight to twelve hours a day doing just that. I don't have the time to play Doom in my cube, and my butt would be kicked if I did, anyway. But maybe I'm not alone. I just read in INTERACTIVE WEEK, that the makers of three-D environments for the Web are falling by the wayside. INTERACTIVE WEEK says, It's a far cry from 1995, when entrants rushed into a market they thought could reach 1 billion dollars by now. But the lack of widely distributed 3-D browsers, few good authoring tools, limitations in bandwidth and low modem and processor speeds have hampered its growth. Sure, some still hold out hope. Hang on! Chat room avatars are coming! VRML-enabled PCs are coming! 56 kilobit per second modems! Pentium 60 chips! New compression techniques! Faster playback engines! That'll change everything, sure. But until that stuff comes bundled in a package that costs less than a twelve bedroom in Beverly Hills, I'll stick to typing, cable teevee, flaming my friends, and sneering at web sites for my entertainment. Still if anybody wants to donate an ISDN line to help me in my stilted efforts to stay abreast, well, I'll love you forever. At least, I'll keep the flaming to a minimum.
Words you need to know to survive in the Digital Age: Acrobat, admin, agent, alias, alpha, Alt, AltaVista, analog, ANSI, antialias, antivirus, AOL, API, app, Apple, applet, Archie, archiver, ARPAnet, ASCII, asynchronous, AT command set, AT&T chipset, ATM, attachment, AUP, avatar, AVI, Baby Bell, backbone, backdoor, background process, backslash, bagbiter, Bamf!
Words you need to know to survive in the Digital Age: Bandwidth, bang path, barney, baud, BBS, beta, \i BFD, binary, bit, bitmap, bloatware, bogus, bookmark, bot, box, BPS, \i brain dump, browser, bug, bulletproof, byte, C, C plus plus, cache, careware, carrier, CGI, chat, checksum, chipset, chooser, client, Clipper Chip, cloak, clone, co-ax, CODEC, dot com, comm, compatible, CompuServe, conference, content, Control-L, cookie, CPS, crash and burn, CRC, crosspost, cyberwhat-eh-ver, debbie, de facto, demoware, DES, desktop, dialer, digital, domain, dongle, DOS, down, download, driver.
Echo. Email all definitions to me immediately if you wish to survive-- e-mail, EMF, emoticons, encryption, Ethernet, Eudora, FAQ, faxmodem, finger, firewall, flamer, foreground, forum, free speech, freeware, freeze, FTP, fudge factor, gateway, gearhead, Geek Code, GIF, glitch, gopher, guest, gooey, hacker, half duplex, hardwired, header, homepage, host, HTML.
IMHO, these are words you need to know to survive in the Digital Age. Infoseeek, Intel, Intellectual property, IP, IRC, IRQ, ISDN, ISO, ISP, ahh! Acronym overload! Java, Jolt, JPEG, lamer, LAN, latency, link, list, list server, log in, log on, lurker, Lycos, Macintosh, macro, Magellan, mainframe (obsolete), Microsoft, mime, minitower, modem, morphing, Mosaic, M-peg, mud, multimedia, multitasking, net, netcop, netgod, netiquette, netizen, Netscape, newbie, newsgroup, non disclosure agreement, non-linear, notebook, NTP, null, offline, offsite, open, oracle, org, packet, page, palmtop, parity, patch, PBX, path, PC, PDA, PDP, phreak, god I hate that word, pirate, plaintext, platform, plug in, POP, port address, post, pound, PPP, Prodigy, protocol, Quicken, RealAudio, reboot, oh yeah, like that never happens, RFC, root account, router, RSI- ow, my elbow hurts, RTF, screen name, scripting, search engine, server, shareware, shell account, Shockwave, signal to noise ratio how'm I doing? Slash.
Snail mail, socket, spam, spider, stack, Stuffit, Suck, sysop, system, T1 T2 T3, woh that's fast! Thread, tilde, tool, tower, trojan, tweak, UNIX, upgrade, URL, USENET, vaporware, Veronica, virus, VRML, WAN, web, web page, web server, web site, wetware, Windows, Wintel, Wired, wirehead, wonk, workstation, world wide web, worm, Yahoo!, Zip, I don't what it all means. Hope you do. I gotta go.
Now, the World Wide Web is fun in a frustrating kind of way. Every time I see the words "DNS entry not found," I throw back my head and roar with delight. But ever since I realized that the Web has a worm, that is, an indexing tool that scans the Web and collects URLs, I've been a little queasy. I feel like I should take the World Wide Web to the vet, or something. A worm in a web? In real life, that's kind of creepy. In cyberspace, it's cool.
Of course, I've given up on the idea of taking the World Wide Web in for shots and a checkup. Couldn't find a pet carrier big enough. Oh, I had a THREE-D model of a pet carrier, all right, textures bitmaps and polys were looking pretty good, but every time I put it in the car, I'd crash. So there you go, or don't go, as the case usually is.
Maybe the time has come to define the limits of this little virtual world. Let's stop kidding ourselves. There are some things you can do very well on the Internet-- swap insults, information, and strange sexual fantasies. Want to download a plug-in that you can never get to work? Done in a snap! Roam aimlessly through a wilderness of links? Hey, that's what the Web is all about.
But there are some things the Internet just cannot provide: hot coffee, a hot shower, an organ transplant, or rabies shot, for instance. You can't get an Indian burn, a wedgie, or a Hertz donut, unless it's virtual.
You can't catch the Measles, or an I Love Lucy rerun, not yet anyway. Can't catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a rainy day, or open an umbrella which would be bad luck anyway, unless you log on outside in the rain, and how likely is that?
You can't have a mano a mano fight to the death with a supervillain bent on global domination, unless the supervillain is a cluster of polygons. You can't go really fast down the freeway the wrong way with your lights out.
You can't pick your nose, though you can pick your friend's nose, in certain chat rooms, if you have the right password. You can't shave. You can't pad around your wretched hovel scratching yourself and mumbling. There are no wretched hovels in cyberspace. Either a site is cool or it's not. Still you can't fall in love with a website. You can fall in love, maybe, if you're lucky, but take my advice, and never never fall in love with tech support. They'll only break your heart. I gotta go.
In the course of judging the annual bad Hemingway contest at Harry's Bar and Grill, Ray Bradbury was asked to give advice to young writers. According to the Orange County Register, he told them to "read, read, read, and put away computers." He said, "Forget the Internet, that's all crap."
I can sense the strangled yet bemused rage from some of you at this statement. Some of you are no doubt thinking, "The Internet? Crap? What's his IP address? I'm going to flame the hell out of that guy!" Calm down everybody. The dude's old. He's a cube, man. He's a print-based analog straight up vodka martini kind of guy. He doesn't have e-mail.
And he does have a point. Now there are some who have claimed, and continue to claim, that reading Charles Dickens on a computer screen, say, is equivalent to reading him in print. Sorry, but that's just not true. You can't curl up under a quilt on the couch with a computer, and flip pages languidly. In order to flip, you need a mouse, or at the very least, a keyboard. In real life, you would have to don robot arms, or a hook, every time you picked up a book. You can't take a computer to the beach, on a bus, or cram it into a book bag.
You could get some super-thin state-of-the-art, liquid crystal display personal digital companion that would fit neatly in your inside jacket pocket. But that'd set you back upwards of a thousand bucks, and you can get a used paperback of GREAT EXPECTATIONS for, oh, fifty cents. And if you lose it, who cares? You can check it out for free at the library anyway.
And while we're on the subject of libraries, when did they stop being libraries, and start becoming a damn database? I'm one of those guys who preferred the old wooden analog filing system to the digital filing system today. In the first place, one system is just as good as another, since the book you want is never there anyway. But at least with a card catalogue, you can find something similar to the book you were looking for, an analog if you will. With the digital system, the book is either there or it's not. In the second place, I never had to wait in line for the card catalog when they were analog. Every time I go to use a terminal, there's some teenage boy sitting there pretending to be a mighty warrior in a multi-user domain. In the third place, a three by five note card does not crash. So what does the Internet have to offer the modern content seeker? Four words: live nude video teleconferencing. It ain't bad Hemingway, but it'll do. I gotta go.
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