The late Chris Tame, whom I used to assist in the running of the Alternative Bookshop and of the Libertarian Alliance, used to say, of blogging, that it was “here today and gone tomorrow”. Well, indeed, most of it does pretty much fall off most of our merely mental radar sets by around the middle of the following week, but most of it is still there, and if you want to remember and refer back to an ancient internet essay or blog posting, you can usually find it. And actually, as the internet gets older, what is striking is how much better it remembers things than did the old print media, or even than did the pre-internet apparatus of print-based scholarship. Why? Basically, because anyone (you don’t have to spend the entire day in some newspaper library in North London) can type a few vaguely remembered words or phrases into Google, and up it comes. So long as you have even a vague recollection of whatever it was, then you can dredge it all up again, and tell the world all about it, again.
I was reminded of all this by a posting yesterday by Mr Eugenides, which is basically a quote from something written in 1995, which is about – please forgive how self-referential this is becoming – how the Internet wouldn’t ever amount to anything:
Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.
The author now admits he was quite wrong. He has had to, however much he might have wished that his unwise words could just have been forgotten.
The central point is that the power of the internet to entertain, inform, and by and by to change the world for the better, is not derived from the average quality of the average internetter, but from what the best internetters manage routinely, and from what us more routine internetters manage at our best. And that power just grows and grows.
The internet adds up to a brilliant bunch of reviewers, a brilliant bunch of critics, and a brilliant bunch of editors, brilliant meaning whatever you think brilliant means. It corrects errors. It draws your attention to things that on your own you would have entirely missed. It plants numerous flags and banners in that “wasteland”. It filters data relentlessly, to suit all intellects and tastes. A “wasteland of unfiltered data” is exactly what it is not.
It helps that almost all persistent internetters, as a natural consequence of what we do and of how others respond, also learn and learn.
Which reminds me, I must dig up an ld posting that Mr Eugenides did a few months back about what a useless git Richard North is. Ah yes, here. This took me about ten seconds to find. I wonder what Mr E thinks about that now.
Cliff Stoll (who wrote that Newsweek piece in 1995) was a very technically sophisticated person who was quite famous on the internet in the early 1990s. Working as system administrator while an astronomy grad student at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in the 1980s, he detected an intruder to the laboratory’s computers over the internet. He tracked this intruder subtly over a period of months, gradually brought law enforcement and the Intelligence Services into it, and ended with much of the responsiblity for catching a ring of spies who were working in Germany for the Soviet Union. He then wrote a classic book about it that I recommend to everyone. (Really, go out and read it right now. It’s terrific).
Then, when the first wave of mass media hype about the internet hit in 1993 or so, Stoll decided to play professional maverick, and wrote another book in which he decided to play professional maverick against the hype. This was overly negative about the genuine positives, but was intelligent and nuanced and had some smart things to say, particularly about where computers are and aren’t useful in education. The book has been constantly in print and was reprinted this year. Read into that what you will. (I don’t suggest you rush off and read this one right now, but it is nonetheless still a quite intelligent book).
When Newsweek decided in 1995 to devote an issue to how this great internet thing was going to revolutionise our lives, they decided to have one article at the end from someone taking a negative view. As Stoll was someone who was an expert on this internet thing who had taken a negative view recently, they asked him to compile an article for them taking the edited negative highlights of his book, basically. Thus came the very foolish Newsweek article that has been mocked so much on the internet this week. The “This is how clueless Newsweek was in 1995” line that I have heard quite a bit of this week is wrong both about Newsweek and wrong about Cliff Stoll.
This bothers me, because something from the past has been taken out of context, and somebody worthy of considerable respect has spent the last week been mocked by ignoramuses, basically, for one foolish thing he published. Partly his fault, certainly, for letting and perhaps encouraging Newsweek take him out of context in the first place, but these were amongst the first interactions between the internet and the mass media. (Think of all that has happened since). All the context has been lost, and nobody seems particularly eager to dig it up. I can certainly think of one or two things that I wrote that one could find in the Usenet archives from the same period that could be used to mock my present incarnation pretty effectively.
(Of course, I just did dig it up).
Michael
You made my point for me (right at the end).
Not really trying to disagree with you Brian – just feeling the need to fill in the story. Which was indeed your point.
Predicting the future is always a dangerous game. In essence one can only extrapolate from the past and present, and the internet in 1995 did indeed fall far short of the hype.
The lesson to take from it, though, is not about what fools they were in the past, but about what fools we must be all unknowing in the present. Our judgements of what’s good and bad – a significant advance or a dead end – are similarly flawed. It should teach us humility. And maybe a little awe, at our unimaginable future.
PA
Re predicting the course of technology, a pattern I’ve noticed again and again is that some new principle, some new way of doing things, gets discovered by techy-academics, and they get excited, and predict that very soon, we’ll all have whatever it is. But then, silence, for about half a decade. And then, just when I’ve given up all hope, bam! Suddenly, it materialises, at first very expensively, but then, quite soon, very cheaply.
The one I particularly recall is optical character recognition, which they anounced as a possibility, but then seemed just to forget about. Until suddenly, there it was. Oh the joy of just being able to scan stuff in, instead of typing it all out again.
I think what this demonstrates is that technological possibilities are relatively easy to see, if you are in the right place to be seeing them, and especially if you have discovered them yourself. But, turning a principle into a product often takes far longer than is at first assumed, by the somewhat unworldly scientists. Technological development, that is to say, is rather hard and can take a long time. Sometimes, as you say, it can proved an insuperable barrier.
However, in general I am very impressed by how often excited and exciting prophesies about technology do come true. Eventually.
However, my posting is about the power of the internet to look backwards, rather than forwards. Although, yes, in this case, backwards to past predictions.
somebody worthy of considerable respect has spent the last week been mocked by ignoramuses, basically, for one foolish thing he published
That was one of the first responses to ClimateGate, too. “How dare you little people attack this Great Man(n), focusing on something he published rather than revering him for his complete life’s work.”
A lot has been written on the value of the internet in disintermediation in commerce; it’s also been useful to disintermediate various people’s reputations and their thoughts, to see whether the latter withstand scrutiny by people who are not overawed by the former.
These are all fair points, and I’m sure Stoll also wrote many things which were much more prophetic – but the dissonance is amusing.
In response to your little aside about Richard North, you’re quite right, of course – his work over the past three months has been among the finest in the blogosphere. Mea culpa.
What I was getting at in that post, though, was the sheer repetitiveness with which he was (at that time) criticising others for not writing about the same things as him, and his habit of framing stories in such a way that the only person who sees the true picture is, inevitably, himself.
I still feel that criticism was well observed and I stand by it – but acknowledge that North’s blogging on Climategate and Pachauri has been of the very highest order and deserves an Orwell prize, a Bloggie – or perhaps even a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
Mr E
Yes, I agree on both counts. North’s blogging recently has been stellar. His manner when you wrote that about him was indeed rather annoying, in just the way you described.
The irony is that North’s annoying weakness, the desire to present himself as the cleverest person involved in any story he writes about, looks now also to be his great strength. The good thing about people who are desperate to be thought clever is that by far the best way to accomplish this is to say things which actually are truly clever. This is exactly what North has done, especially recent re Climategate. Although, I had already got to the stage of thinking him truly clever when you wrote that posting, as well as annoying.
You can do great things and be a pain in the arse. You can do great things because you are a pain in the arse.
I was truly curious about how you now viewed that posting. Many thanks for the answer, which I found very convincing. Apart from the mea culpa bit which I consider to be superfluous.
A point about the internet and storage of knowledge.
The ability to quickly retrieve historic materials is a great tool in helping to hold various people to account (i.e. it’s harder to flip flop without being caught out) but it also means that it’s harder to leave your past behind. A lot of impetuous teenage acts will be recorded forever for your future parents in law and children to see. People don’t seem to have the same sense of privacy now. As long as they don’t change then that will be fine.
But I’m sure a lot of older people live by the ‘I was young, that was then, this is now, no-body needs to know about that’ motto and that porno pic or film shoot or face-book entry is going to hang around preventing a clean break with the past.
MaryMark,
Agreed – but I think that damage to people’s reputations from one or two embarrassing pics will be less in the future than it is for a picture of equal embarrassingness now because so many people will have similar pictures in their pasts.
What interests and worries me more will be that people will find it harder to leave their embarrassing opinions behind.
One of the reasons I was so sad that Chris Tame died was that I think he might, just might have changed his mind about the role of the internet by now. The internet has been a big force in helping to spread news about causes that I suspect he would have cared a great deal about and shining a light on issues that the MSM have chosen, mostly, to ignore. The Climategate issue is a good example. The use of the Tea Party movement of the internet has also been a force in spreading ideas about low-tax, pro-liberty ideas more generally.
This posting highlights for me the impossibility of accurate predictions about anything especially new technology. Blogging, and its effects, have changed, and are changing, in ways that could not have been predicted.
My point is that people, whose opinions I respect, were utterly wrong about how blogging would develop. How many things in life are not allowed to develop because our political masters have predicted undesirable results.
Mr E: I wish I had not used the word “ignoramuses” in my first comment in the way I did, because it was really only aimed at one or two people (not including you), and it comes across as being more widely directed. It is of course perfectly fair game to quote what Stoll said in 1995 and comment on how wrong it turned out to be, but I have seen a couple of posts elsewhere on the internet that turned into rather nasty abuse directed at him without understanding anything about who he was or the context of how he said what he did, and these annoyed me.
The thing about Stoll’s article is that when you read the examples he gives, it’s quite persuasive. It was true of the internet back in the mid-’90s. Search for something back then and often you wouldn’t find anything useful; partly because search engines weren’t as good as Google, but mostly because it wasn’t there. What he failed to see was what it would become, and the infinite memory that Brian talks of.
Not clueless, just unimaginative.
That’s North to a “T”. And I suspect he’d agree with you; in fact I think he’s said almost exactly that of himself in the past.
I used to subscribe to Newsweek as a boy (yes I was that “sad” in the modern sense). I am not sure why – as it was never very good.
Well correct that – I DO know why I subscribed. Even as a boy I was very interested indeed in the United States – there was no internet in those days, and Newsweek was the only American magazine I had seen in Kettering, Northamptonshire so therefore…………
That is how the “mainstream media” made money – people had to buy the product (if they were interested in American affairs) even if they did not agree with the political opinions of the people who ran the news magazines (and “mainstream” newspapers and television). The internet has changed this. It will not “distroy print journalism” (at least I do not think so), but it does hit the margin (and hit it very hard indeed) – if someone says to themselves (as I did every week) “I do not like how this is presented – and I do not like the bias in it” THEY WILL NO LONGER BUY THE PRODUCT. The “captive market” is gone.
Anyway even I eventually dropped Newsweek – Milton Friedman was forced out and that was the last straw. Friedman (like Henry Hazlitt before him) was a nod towards the anti big government part of the readership (the people who did not like the mainstream Newsweek journalists) a counter balance to the de facto editorial line. By getting rid of him (and he was got rid of – it was NOT a retirement) the msm people at Newsweek spat in our faces.
By then I had gone on to the specialist conservative and libertarian American publications anyway.
As for the internet – oddly enough I was one of the early political commentors to write on it.
Yes me – a person with no computer knowledge at all. I was on an internal political comment computer forum at the University of York from 1989 – and suddenly we were no longer chatting with each other, we were talking with people in other parts of the world (via various boards – with words like “politics”, “economics” or “philosophy” with the “alt.” or whatever.
However, I doubt any of “Lycrophon” s stuff is still about – things do get lost from the internet over time (at least they used to).
When I was in library school from 98-01, many colleagues scoffed at the utility of the Internet, calling it cluttered with bad and disorganized information. Worst of all, they argued, it was temporary. Information could be deleted with a keystroke.
Oh, how they were wrong! Anything on the Internet is permanent, and anything in print is temporary.
And if the Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular has shown us anything, it is that “facts” of the print generation were often just unchallenged and, more importantly, unchallengeable lies. The Bush National Guard memos of 2004, for example, would have been accepted into the canons of history, had that news story occurred only ten years prior.
This makes me wonder how many lies made it into the history books that we can no longer prove or disprove because the gatekeepers of information successfully established the narrative.
A lot of it John.
A classic example is the Congressional Record.
Senators and Congressmen are allowed to “revise their remarks” which means that everything before C SPAN has to be taken with a mountain of salt (these printed pages need bare no simularity to what was actually said in Congress).
Also documents have been getting “lost” for decades.
For example, M. Stanton Evans found (when doing his research for “Blacklisted by History”) that almost every document that might have had material backing up Senator McCarthy on it had been “lost” from the official archives. However, the establishment had been lazy – and had not purged department archives and personal archives.
But for an historian who is not willing to do a lot of digging and just trusts what the official sources will give him – American history is a closed book, or rather an open book with some pages ripped out (litterally ripped – pits of paper left round the punch holes) and other pages replaced by stuff written much more recently and backdated.
And it carries on…
For example do you think any of those films of Obama’s henchpersons praising Mao and other mass murderers (or Obama’s own Marxist rantings) are going to get into any of the official histories or archives?
Of course not (they do not even get into the newspapers) – but in the age of the internet they do not have to.