http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/08/29/stirevnws02004.html?1334425

August 29 1999 NEWS REVIEW

Don't be afraid, the net is actually an old-fashioned invention,
writes Douglas Adams

A hitchhiker's guide to the internet 

A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week and I was
informed authoritatively by a distinguished journalist that the whole
internet thing was just a silly fad, like ham radio in the 1950s, and
that if I thought any different I was a bit naive. It is a very
British trait - natural, perhaps, for a country that has lost an
empire and found Mr Blobby - to be so suspicious of change.

There's a very peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters (yes,
Humphrys Sr, I'm looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes
"www DOT . . . bbc DOT . . . co DOT . . . uk SLASH . . . today SLASH .
. ." etc, and carries the implication that they have no idea what any
of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will
probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and
puffing with the invention of television, the telephone, cinema,
radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you
would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
a) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just
normal; b) anything that gets invented between then and before you
turn 30 is incredibly exciting and with any luck you can make a career
out of it; c) anything that gets invented after you're 30 is the end
of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for 10 years,
when it gradually turns out to be all right really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile
phones to work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us. For instance,
"interactivity" is one of those neologisms that John Humphrys likes to
dangle from a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we need such a
word is that during this century we have for the first time been
dominated by non-interactive entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded
music and television.

Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre,
music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and
even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping
presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We
didn't need a special word for interactivity, in the same way that we
don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

Because the internet is so new we still don't really understand what
it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because
that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of
rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't
necessarily trust what you read on the web.

Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on
the telephone. The internet is just people talking.

There is, I admit, a great deal wrong with the internet. For one
thing, only a tiny proportion of the world's population is connected.
I recently heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet
would always be just another unbridgeable gulf between rich and poor
because computers would always be expensive, that you had to buy lots
of extras such as modems, and you had to keep upgrading your software.
The list sounds impressive, but doesn't stand a moment's scrutiny.

The cost of powerful computers, which used to be around the level of
jet aircraft, is now down among the colour television sets and still
dropping like a stone. Internet software from Microsoft or Netscape is
famously free. Phone charges in the UK are still high, but dropping.
In America local calls are free. In other words, the cost of
connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason:
the value of the web increases with every person who joins it.

Another problem with the net is that it's still "technology", and
technology, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined
it, is "stuff that doesn't work yet". We no longer think of chairs as
technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when
we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they
should be, and they would often "crash" when we tried to use them.
Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs
(and, a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or
grains of sand).

We are still the first generation of users and, for all that we may
have invented the net, we still don't really get it. In The Language
Instinct, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between
pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when
you put together a bunch of people - typically slaves - who have
already grown up with their own language but don't know each other's.
They manage to cobble together a rough-and-ready lingo made up of bits
of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no
grammatical structure. However, the first generation of children born
to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and
transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar
and vocabulary, which is what we call a creole. The same thing is
happening in communication technology.

Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version, not quite
understanding where e-mail goes and cursing at the beeps of mobile
phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely
different. Risto Lintur, of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation,
describes in Wired magazine the extraordinary behaviour of kids in the
city's streets, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities.
They are just staying in touch. "These kids are connected to their
herd - they always know where it's moving," he says.

For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities
in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually our
communities became too large for us to be able to feel a part of them,
and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together.
But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking.
These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so
fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn't even know to have
names for them.

  Douglas Adams is the presenter of a two-part series on the internet
beginning this Wednesday on Radio 4