Gary Chapman's piece, forwarded below, is provocative, in forcasting the 
end of the WWW as a place for telecommunications without profit pressures.

Nevertheless, isn't it a we bit premature for a seasoned scholar to be
jumping into the hype of gratuitous forcasts predicting the "death of the
WWW" based merely on the unrealized ambitions of commercial exploitation
of the Net?  Newspapers came on like ganghbusters some time ago, with
ambitions of taking over the Net also, and all that has happened is the
realization that self expression remains the most powerful force liberated
by the Net.  

There is no viable business use of the Net that can compare to the latter
dynamic.  Until entrepreneurs adjust their ambitions from that of rip off
artists governed by the primitive morality of the marketplace to
purposeful participants in the holistic realities of cyberspace, this
story is continuing to spawn positive possibilities.  

Certainly there remains the threat of business decadence via the
television model of communications bring promoted by many people enlisted
to the task of drowning civilization in hedonism and other mindless
products of McWorld, which Ben Barber has described so well.  Still, the
big story is that the citizens of cyberspace are doing quite well in
resisting this alternative, and we may have the last hurrah despite 
pressures to the contrary! 

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS 

- ------------------Forward message------

On Thu, 14 Mar 1996, Gary Chapman wrote: 

> For most users of the Internet and for the watchful, anxious mavens of Wall
> Street, the World-Wide Web is brand spanking new. It was therefore
> curiosity that pulled me to a panel discussion at this week's
> South-By-Southwest (SXSW) Multimedia Festival, in Austin, a panel with the
> provocative title, "Is the Web Dead?'' And it was a little strange to hear
> all four of the panelists answer yes.
> 
> Austin has ambitions, as one speaker put it, to transform itself from the
> "slacker capital of the world'' into the world's leading center of
> multimedia production. The city is crawling with startup firms of young
> people who spend most of their waking lives in front of a computer screen
> -- not just programmers, but graphic artists, musicians, animators,
> writers, composers, and "concept directors.'' There are constant rumors
> that Microsoft is close to putting its multimedia center in Austin. The
> city is poised to marry its booming high tech economy with its arts
> community and take advantage of the youth culture that permeates this
> university town.
> 
> The SXSW Multimedia Festival, which is part of a larger film and music
> festival, was guaranteed to make anyone over 35 feel like Methuselah. The
> average age seemed to be about 25, and participants were nearly all dressed
> in T-shirts with obscure logos, baggy pants and sandals, with a few
> postmodern Roy Rogers getups thrown in for color. They drank lattes and
> jabbered about "joy sticking minds'' with CD-ROMs and new, interactive Web
> games. A New Age masseuse was doing a brisk business in the corridor out
> side the exhibition hall.
> 
> As hard as it may be to take sage advice from people who are a few months
> out of college, we had better listen to them. The next Netscape may emerge
> from this crowd.
> 
> Why do they think the Web is dead? Of course, it depends on what one means
> by "the Web.'' Phil Hood, the editor of NewMedia magazine, and one of the
> SXSW panelists, said, "The dream of a free, egalitarian, universal
> information sandbox is dead.'' It is that vision of the World-Wide Web that
> seems to be on its last legs, ironically because of the recent, massive
> influx of new users that have been attracted to the Internet by the Web's
> ease of use and its promise of limitless information.
> 
> Fifty per cent of the ten million people using the Internet in the U.S.
> started using it in 1995. Within the past couple of years, the Internet has
> been transformed from a communications network used almost exclusively by
> academics, scientists, and government officials to a mainstream
> communications medium that is universally regarded as the future of
> information dissemination for the entire globe.
> 
> This metamorphosis has had two significant effects. First, it attracted
> private corporations to the net, which hope to reach millions of new
> customers in a medium that is far more conducive to targeted marketing than
> television. Second, it has introduced a version of the "tragedy of the
> commons'' to cyberspace -- the phrase ecologist Garrett Hardin invented in
> 1968 to describe what happens when too many people pursue their private
> advantage, with diminishing returns, in a common space, which leads to
> fencing and private, market-based arrangements.
> 
> The commercialization of the Internet, via the World-Wide Web, first
> produced online advertising, with users clicking on ad "banners'' to jump
> to an advertiser's Web page. But only a handful of Web sites are making
> money from advertising.
> 
> The next step, which is increasingly prevalent on the Web, is registering
> users and then using the registration data to build consumer profiles that
> are valuable in themselves. A related step, not common now but expected to
> grow, is electronic subscriptions, which will depend on developments in
> cash transfer over the Internet.
> 
> The "tragedy of the commons'' is reflected in the expanding prevalence of
> junk e-mail -- "spamming'' -- and in the visible slowdown of many Web sites
> because of overloaded network traffic. Some corporations are exploring the
> use of "spam-killing'' software to protect their e-mail systems. Others are
> creating virtual "zones'' of Internet access by building Web sites that can
> only be accessed by people with very high-speed connections, or else a lot
> of patience. And some of the big telecom companies are even building their
> own, proprietary high-speed net works, like @Home, a project of TCI, the
> giant cable TV company.
> 
> The frontier metaphor for cyberspace is overused and tired, but the idea
> that these trends represent the "fencing'' of the electronic frontier is
> not inappropriate. It was, after all, increasing population that spawned
> the fencing of the Western frontier a hundred years ago. In fact, the
> scramble for market share that the new federal telecom reform legislation
> has unleashed might be thought of as the new "range wars'' of the
> electronic frontier -- the parceling out of cyberspace. The Communications
> Decency Act is playing a major role in the erection of new cyber-fences.
> 
> The astonishing thing to behold is how fast this has all happened, how
> rapidly we went from the "dream'' of an unlimited information frontier to
> the current frenzy for fencing the information commons.
> 
> The "closing'' of the American frontier in the West was announced by
> historian Frederick Jackson Turner in a famous speech in 1893. This
> produced a crisis of confidence in the U.S. at the time, which eventually
> set the stage for a significant political movement, Teddy Roosevelt's "Bull
> Moose'' Progressive Party. Will the "death'' of the World- Wide Web and the
> "fencing'' of the electronic frontier have some analogous effect on the
> politics of the U.S. a hundred years later?
> 
> Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of
> Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS 


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End of online-news-digest V1 #559
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