BlingBang: I'm Back

It's been a long vacation from BlingBang for me. Fortunately my co-author here has a whole lot less to do with his time, so he was able to bring the site back. And after a few posts from him, I couldn't help but return too.

Plenty to talk about yesterday's Oscars. Like the crazy lady who Kanye-d the director of "Music by Prudence" (turns out she's the director, and they have a running feud).

Or the hurt the Hurt Locker laid on Avatar, which I was personally pulling for.

Or the awesome acceptance speech by Tarantino that never happened.

Or how Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin were beyond awful.

But my friend found a link that is worth putting before all of that.

This is a Newsweek article from 1995 by the unfortunate Clifford Stoll about why this new thing called the internet is never going to live up to the hype.

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

It gets worse

We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

As a footnote, Clifford Stoll currently sells blown glass bottles on the internet.

BlingBang

March 08, 2010

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