Idiotic article in Slate
Posted By jss on February 25, 2009
The normally pretty smart Farhad Manjoo has written a very silly article for Slate that says “The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.” Farhad graduated from Cornell in 2000, according to his bio, which makes him old enough to know better. The full article is headlined Jurassic Web … and is billed as an “investigation.”
“What did people do on the web in 1996? We couldn’t remember, either …”
Well, shit. It’s not like we’re talking about the ’70s, where if you remember them, you must not have been having a good time. Farhad: There was plenty to do. It was d-u-m-b of you, Farhad, to quote Time magazine about the ‘Net from back then. Time, in particular, did not understand the Internet; and was so stupid about it that they shut down, way prematurely, pathfinder.com, which they could have grown into a dominant Internet site but instead reverted to what it is today — a gateway to subscribe to print publications. I want to type “Hahahahaha” here but … well, OK, I did.
What does this have to do with sex? Well, let’s see. People were meeting on the Internet, dating and fucking in 1995. They were downloading porn, which freaked Time out. They were … communicating. Everything that we’re doing with the Internet now, we were doing or trying to do then. Here’s what sex.com, for example, looked like in 1996. (Link … and prepare for the attack of the animated GIFs.)
You asked the wrong people, Farhad. I’m going to quote myself here, from 1995:
… In fact, check out Time, February 5, 1993. “CYBERPUNK,” screams the headline. “Virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock ‘n’ roll! A futuristic subculture erupts from the electronic underground.” By 1995, Time had advanced to “Cyberporn!” on the cover. This is the country’s foremost news weekly, covering the Internet. Cheap shot, but true.
I wrote this, then, about the bad job that journalists were doing as they looked forward. I didn’t know it was going to apply 14 years later to journalists looking backward.
Journalists have a habit of reporting things as though they discovered them, which is fine when they do; uncovering misdeeds and raising unsung heroes to common attention are noble pursuits. But the Internet and cyberspace in general are not things or concepts that lend themselves to journalistic cubbyholing: “Look what I found!” doesn’t mean as much when the finder is the millionth visitor to a “new” World Wide Web site.
Time was right in the forefront of scaring a lot of people, most notably U.S. Sen. James Exon, D-Neb., who succeeded in getting the Senate to pass a bill ostensibly making it illegal for people to transmit pornography in cyberspace. With its superficial, “Hey, look what we found” reporting, Time also earned the ridicule of millions of pretty bright people who use computers frequently, and put a lot of journalists who spend time on-line in the unpleasant position of having to explain that most of their peers, even (and sometimes especially) the well-paid famous ones, don’t have a clue about what’s going on out there. Connie Chung pronounced DOS with a long “O” in an interview with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates; this is incredibly funny to a lot of people, and makes journalists look really stupid.
Try again, Farhad. You’re looking bad on this one, almost as bad as Philip Elmer-DeWitt did back then. Go ask … oh, there are lots of people. Try John Perry Barlow or Dave Farber or John Gilmore. Try Nicholas Negroponte or Declan McCullagh. Or even … try me. The Internet was an amazing place, even in 1996, and there are lots of people who remember.
The introduction to Into Temptation, in fact, describes people and events from 1996. The infrastructure and the market for social and sexual networking were already on a collision course.
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"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2010, of a book by the same name.
Manjoo actually contradicts himself within his own column. He starts off with the assertion that there was very little to do online in 1996, and then he proceeds to give a long list of things we DID do. Perhaps he’s not impressed with the internet of 1996 because it didn’t have all of the bells and whistles it has today, but for those of us who were online back then (Greg got his first AOL account that year shortly after it started charging a flat monthly rate for access), the internet has always been an incredible communication device.
Hiya you guys …
Maybe they didn’t seem like much to Manjoo because … well, he didn’t do them. The biggest difference I see between then and now is that my friends then were generally “geekier” … which is to say, far more computer literate … than most people are today. It was a little more difficult to use the Internet then, and it was slower. But we mostly did the same things we do now.