Internet - A Medium or a Message? (Part X )

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:

Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent


This is an unconventional way to look at the Internet. Laymen and
experts alike talk about "sites" and "advertising space". Yet, the
Internet was never compared to a new continent whose surface is
infinite.

The Internet will have its own real estate developers and
construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their
profits from the scarcity of the resource that they exploit - the
Internet counterparts will derive their profits from the tenants
(the content).

Two examples:

A few companies bought "Internet Space" (pages, domain names,
portals), developed it and make commercial use of it by:

a.. renting it out;
b.. constructing infrastructure and selling it;
c.. providing an intelligent gateway, entry point to the rest of
the internet;
d.. or selling advertising space which subsidizes the tenants
(Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others);
e.. Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names identical to
brand names in the "real" world) and then selling the domain name to
an interested party.
Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The investment is
low and getting lower with the introduction of competition in the
field of domain registration services and the increase in the number
of top domains.

Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for free
home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is precisely
this infrastructure that the developer can later sell, lease,
franchise, or rent out.

At the beginning, only members of the fringes and the avant-garde
(inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers) invest in a new
invention. The invention of a new communications technology is
mostly accompanied by devastating silence.

No one knows to say what are the optimal uses of the invention (in
other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members of the
scientific and business elites - argue that there is no real need
for the invention and that it substitutes a new and untried way for
old and tried modes of doing the same thing (so why assume the
risk?).

These criticisms are usually founded:

To start with, there is, indeed, no need for the new medium. A new
medium invents itself - and the need for it. It also generates its
own market to satisfy this newly found need.

Two prime examples are the personal computer and the compact disc.

When the PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear. Its
performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was horribly user
unfriendly.

It suffered from faulty design, absent user comfort and ease of use
and required considerable professional knowledge to operate. The
worst part was that this knowledge was unique to the new invention
(not portable).

It reduced labour mobility and limited one's professional horizons.
There were many gripes among those assigned to tame the new beast.

The PC was thought of, at the beginning, as a sophisticated gaming
machine, an electronic baby-sitter. As the presence of a keyboard
was detected and as the professional horizon cleared it was thought
of in terms of a glorified typewriter or spreadsheet. It was used
mainly as a word processor (and its existence justified solely on
these grounds). The spreadsheet was the first real application and
it demonstrated the advantages inherent to this new machine (mainly
flexibility and speed). Still, it was more (speed) of the same. A
quicker ruler or pen and paper. What was the difference between this
and a hand held calculator (some of them already had computing,
memory and programming features)?

The PC was recognized as a medium only 30 years after it was
invented with the introduction of multimedia software. All this
time, the computer continued to spin off markets and secondary
markets, needs and professional specialities. The talk as always was
centred on how to improve on existing markets and solutions.

The Internet is the computer's first important breakthrough.
Hitherto the computer was only quantitatively different - the
multimedia and the Internet have made it qualitatively superior,
actually, sui generis, unique.

This, precisely, is the ghost haunting the Internet:

It has been invented, is maintained and is operated by computer
professionals. For decades these people have been conditioned to
think in Olympic terms: more, stronger, higher. Not: new,
unprecedented, non-existent. To improve - not to invent. They
stumbled across the Internet - it invented itself despite its own
creators.

Computer professionals (hardware and software experts alike) - are
linear thinkers. The Internet is non linear and modular.

It is still the age of hackers. There is still a lot to be done in
improving technological prowess and powers. But their control of the
contents is waning and they are being gradually replaced by
communicators, creative people, advertising executives,
psychologists and the totally unpredictable masses who flock to
flaunt their home pages.

These all are attuned to the user, his mental needs and his
information and entertainment preferences.

The compact disc is a different tale. It was intentionally invented
to improve upon an existing technology (basically, Edison's
Gramophone). Market-wise, this was a major gamble: the improvement
was, at first, debatable (many said that the sound quality of the
first generation of compact discs was inferior to that of its
contemporaneous record players). Consumers had to be convinced to
change both software and hardware and to dish out thousands of
dollars just to listen to what the manufacturers claimed was better
quality Bach. A better argument was the longer life of the software
(though contrasted with the limited life expectancy of the consumer,
some of the first sales pitches sounded absolutely morbid).

The computer suffered from unclear positioning. The compact disc was
very clear as to its main functions - but had a rough time
convincing the consumers.

Every medium is first controlled by the technical people. Gutenberg
was a printer - not a publisher. Yet, he is the world's most famous
publisher. The technical cadre is joined by dubious or small-scale
entrepreneurs and, together, they establish ventures with no clear
vision, market-oriented thinking, or orderly plan of action. The
legislator is also dumbfounded and does not grasp what is happening -
thus, there is no legislation to regulate the use of the medium.
Witness the initial confusion concerning copyrighted software and
the copyrights of ROM embedded software. Abuse or under-utilization
of resources grow. Recall the sale of radio frequencies to the first
cellular phone operators in the West - a situation which repeats
itself in Eastern and Central Europe nowadays.

But then more complex transactions - exactly as in real estate
in "real life" - begin to emerge.

This distinction is important. While in real life it is possible to
sell an undeveloped plot of land - no one will buy "pages". The
supply of these is unlimited - their scarcity (and, therefore, their
virtual price) is zero.

The second example involves the utilization of a site - rather than
its mere availability.

A developer could open a site wherein first time authors will be
able to publish their first manuscript - for a fee. Evidently, such
a fee will be a fraction of what it would take to publish a "real
life" book. The author could collect money for any downloading of
his book - and split it with the site developer. The potential
buyers will be provided with access to the contents and to a chapter
of the books. This is currently being done by a few fledgling firms
but a full scale publishing industry has not yet developed.


(continued)


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