Wrong!

Newsweek is running this hilarious piece about a 1995 editorial – written by Cliff Stoll – in which Stoll emphatically pronounced that the internet was overhyped, and would never achieve its predicted greatness. You can read the original Newsweek article (ironically, online) here.

My favorite segment from the original article:

They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Stoll also had an opinion about e-commerce:

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

In truth, Stoll did make a few good points. Among other things, he warned us about the dehumanizing dangers that are posed by mediating human relationships through computers, a concern that seems to have been legitimate. Churches, for example, have likely been directly and adversely impacted by the widespread success of the internet. Just last week, Richard Beck, an experimental psychologist who is interested the psychology or religion (and who has a great blog), postulated that declines in church attendance are directly related to increased utilization of social networking. And he has a pretty strong argument.

What impresses me most about the current Newsweek piece is Stoll's good-natured willingness to recant…and recant…and recant. He readily admits he was wrong and even manages some self-depreciating humor in the process. This one, he says, towers well above some of his other lifetime flubs, which include forgetting a line in a 4th grade play and attempting to dry his sneakers by putting them in a microwave. Good for him! His willingness to speak with humility not only serves as a great example to those of us who will eventually find ourselves on the wrong side of a prediction, but also gives us permission to enjoy a laugh or two over the his gaffe.

Now, before I end, one final quote from the 95 piece:

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Well, he was right about one thing. Nobody is paying for newspapers over the internet.