This makes me wonder what the 'next big thing' will be after the internet.<p>I watched this TedX Talk from Tomi Ahonen and I think he may be right in his 'mass media' perspective.<p>1st mass media: Print (500 years old) including books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards etc<p>2nd mass media: Recordings (from 1890s) such as music records, videogames, videotapes and DVDs etc<p>3rd mass media: Cinema (from 1910s)<p>4th mass media: Radio (from 1920s)<p>5th mass media: Television (from 1950s)<p>6th mass media: Internet (from 1991)<p>7th mass media: Mobile (from 1998)<p>8th mass media: ?<p>He makes the argument that augmented reality will be the next mass media and I think he is right.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU</a>
Can I say that quality of discourse has been degrading and general utility of the net has been suffering? the article brings back memories of archie, usenet and local irc chat rooms.
There isn't anymore a general sinkhole for various activities on the net. Technologies suffered, like usenet from spam wars... yet it is good to have a set of open protocols that would provide foundation for how people use the net, so that it is not fragmented across different levels of technologies. Web had done most of the damage, not sure how to fix that.<p>Any comment? I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear. If there is an underlying protocol to save and distribute semantic data across the web and we could agree on that, that I think would be awesome. I heard of open data, but I doubt that can replace RFC based protocols of yester yore.
IMO.<p>my 2d.
This abstract is perfect:<p><i>True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection. They may append a :-) if they are making a joke (turn your head to the left) or use :-( for an ersatz frown.</i>
This article is really amazing and amusing to me, and not just because of the excitement back then over something like how "news groups produce about 4 million characters of new material a day, the equivalent of about five average books." The author, Barton Gellman, is also the reporter who is covering and breaking stories on the Snowden/NSA beat for the WaPo, including what I think is one of the most remarkable technical stories about it so far ("Fuck these guys" -- <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...</a>). It's funny to me because I've heard Gellman and his partner describe him as not being very tech savvy at all...So even if his current NSA pieces don't go into the finer technical detail, it's still impressive that in 1988, he was able to grok enough of the Internet back then to capture some of its best and most profoundly gamechanging aspects of the Internet...in ways that journalists even today still don't quite appreciate:<p>> <i>Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll, the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson's computer.</i>...<p><i>There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars.</i><p><i>"It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at Lehigh University's computer center.</i>
The title should read "How one newspaper wrote about the Internet in 1988" because clearly, is article is an exception to the goofiness that routinely played in newspapers and TV from the 80 through the mid-90s.