By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

These essays were published by the Israeli (Hebrew) edition of PC
Magazine back in 1996, when the Internet was in its formative epoch.
I have left them essentially unchanged, except for a few minor
errata I corrected. I find time travel fascinating. It is
interesting to recall the mainstream view, ten years ago, about the
Internet, its goals, its role, and its future. So, here goes:

The Internet as a Collective Brain


Drawing a comparison from the development of a human baby - the
human race has just commenced to develop its neural system.

The Internet fulfils all the functions of the Nervous System in the
body and is, both functionally and structurally, pretty similar. It
is decentralized, redundant (each part can serve as functional
backup in case of malfunction). It hosts information which is
accessible in a few ways, it contains a memory function, it is
multimodal (multimedia - textual, visual, audio and animation).

I believe that the comparison is not superficial and that studying
the functions of the brain (from infancy to adulthood) - amounts to
perusing the future of the Net itself.

 1. The Collective Computer

To carry the metaphor of "a collective brain" further, we would
expect the processing of information to take place in the Internet,
rather than inside the end-user's hardware (the same way that
information is processed in the brain, not in the eyes). Desktops
will receive the results and communicate with the Net to receive
additional clarifications and instructions and to convey information
gathered from their environment (mostly, from the user).

This is part fo the philosophy of the JAVA programming language. It
deals with applets - small bits of software - and links different
computer platforms by means of software.

Put differently:

Future servers will contain not only information (as they do today) -
 but also software applications. The user of an application will not
be forced to buy it. He will not be driven into hardware-related
expenditures to accommodate the ever growing size of applications.
He will not find himself wasting his scarce memory and computing
resources on passive storage. Instead, he will use a browser to call
a central computer. This computer will contain the needed software,
broken to its elements (=applets, small applications). Anytime the
user wishes to use one of the functions of the application, he will
siphon it off the central computer. When finished - he will "return"
it. Processing speeds and response times will be such that the user
will not feel at all that it is not with his own software that he is
working (the question of ownership will be very blurred in such a
world). This technology is available and it provoked a heated
debated about the future shape of the computing industry as a whole
(desktops - really power packs - or network computers, a little more
than dumb terminals). Applications are already offered to corporate
users by ASPs (Application Service Providers).

In the last few years, scientists put the combined power of the
computers linked to the internet at any given moment to perform
astounding feats of distributed parallel processing. Millions of PCs
connected to the net co-process signals from outer space,
meteorological data and solve complex equations. This is a prime
example of a collective brain in action.

 2. The Intranet - a Logical Extension of the Collective Computer

LANs (Local Area Networks) are no longer a rarity in corporate
offices. WANs (wide Area Networks) are used to connect
geographically dispersed organs of the same legal entity (branches
of a bank, daughter companies, a sales force). Many LANs are
wireless.

The intranet / extranet and wireless LANs will be the winners. They
will gradually eliminate both fixed line LANs and WANs. The Internet
offers equal, platform-independent, location-independent and time of
day - independent access to all the members of an
organization.Sophisticated firewall security application protects
the privacy and confidentiality of the intranet from all but the
most determined and savvy hackers.

The Intranet is an inter-organizational communication network,
constructed on the platform of the Internet and which enjoys all its
advantages. The extranet is open to clients and suppliers as well.

The company's server can be accessed by anyone authorized, from
anywhere, at any time (with local - rather than international -
communication costs). The user can leave messages (internal e-mail
or v-mail), access information - proprietary or public - from it and
to participate in "virtual teamwork" (see next chapter).

By the year 2002, a standard intranet interface will emerge. This
will be facilitated by the opening up of the TCP/IP communication
architecture and its availability to PCs. A billion USD will go just
to finance intranet servers - or, at least, this is the median
forecast.

The development of measures to safeguard server routed inter-
organizational communication (firewalls) is the solution to one of
two obstacles to the institution of the Intranet. The second problem
is the limited bandwidth which does not permit the efficient
transfer of audio (not to mention video).

It is difficult to conduct video conferencing through the Internet.
Even the voices of discussants who use internet phones come out
(slightly) distorted.

All this did not prevent 95% of the Fortune 1000 from installing
intranet. 82% of the rest intend to install one by the end of this
year. Medium to big size American firms have 50-100 intranet
terminals per every internet one.

At the end of 1997, there were 10 web servers per every other type
of server in organizations. The sale of intranet related software
was projected to multiply by 16 (to 8 billion USD) by the year 1999.

One of the greatest advantages of the intranet is the ability to
transfer documents between the various parts of an organization.
Consider Visa: it pushed 2 million documents per day internally in
1996.

An organization equipped with an intranet can (while protected by
firewalls) give its clients or suppliers access to non-classified
correspondence. This notion has its  charm. Consider a newspaper: it
can give access to all the materials which were discarded by the
editors. Some news are fit to print - yet are discarded because of
space limitations. Still, someone is bound to be interested. It
costs the newspaper close to nothing (the material is, normally,
already computer-resident) - and it might even generate added
circulation and income. It can be even conceived as an "underground,
non-commercial, alternative" newspaper for a wholly different
readership.

The above is but one example of the possible use of the intranet to
communicate with the organization's consumer base.



Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com