< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
The poor, oppressed dot-com industry is asking us to
celebrate Back the Net Day
today by shopping
on-line, buying shares in an on-line company, or donating
on-line to a charity.
Why April 3, instead of a more appropriate April 1?
According to Michael Tchong, the San Francisco dot-com entrepreneur who dreamed this up, today marks the first anniversary of the plunge in technology stocks -- the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell about 350 points on April 3, 2000.
While the Internet offers certain benefits, it has the same problem as a lot of other means of communication: a high ratio of noise to signal.
In communications-industry parlance, signal
is
the information you want (like the words someone speaks
over the phone), and noise
is everything else that
comes along then (like clicks and hums).
In the above case, the noise is accidental. But on the 'Net, it's usually deliberate.
Many website designers seem to think that everyone has a high-speed broadband connection -- a cable modem, perhaps, or a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL).
I'd like to have either one. But AT&T Cable doesn't think Salida is worth serving that way, and Qwest, though it offers DSL in other places and promotes it heavily throughout the territory, likewise doesn't think we're worth any investment. It's our job to be cash cows, milked by monopolies every month, so that those companies can invest in places where there's competition.
And at my dial-up modem speeds, the bells and whistles on so many websites are just a time-consuming annoyance that don't convey any information I want. In other words, they're noise, and they'd be noise if they flooded in at 300,000 bits per second rather streamed in at 52,000 bps.
I don't surf the 'Net to be entertained -- I have a TV and a stereo for that, and every so often, I even get outdoors to enjoy the Rocky Mountains.
When I'm on the Web, I want information, and thousands of sites seem determined to make me sit through interminable displays before I can get what I want. I do try to take note of which companies are the most obnoxious with their blinking graphics and tinny sounds, so that I can avoid doing business with them.
Then there's email. I'd guess that at least 80 percent of the stuff that arrives is stuff I don't want to see, which makes it noise.
And I'm being more than fair here. I do not count as
noise
those recent messages from people who said I
should roast in molten sulfur for eternity because I don't
see room for Ronald Reagan on Mt. Rushmore.
Of the noise, much of it consists of solicitations to
buy 40 million valid email addresses
so that I can
use the proven effectiveness of bulk email
to
promote whatever I might want to sell.
Much of the remaining noise is email that isn't plain old ASCII text -- I have no idea which email program produces HTML gibberish when it's supposed to be sending email, but that thing should be taken off the market yesterday. One recent elaborately formatted message had some text high-lighted in pale yellow characters, rendering it nearly impossible to read, and so I may have missed a chance for three free days of education at an XXX-rated site.
It wasn't that long ago that email was just this side of wonderful -- a quick and cheap way to communicate with people all over the place.
Since its discovery and exploitation by American commerce, email become nearly as annoying as the telephone -- for every message you want, you get a dozen that you don't.
Email is better, in that you can go do something else while it's being transmitted, you can delete it unread, and you can check it only when you feel like doing so.
However, that last advantage is fading with the arrival of instant messaging and the like. The last thing I want when I'm busy writing is for my computer to beep and demand an immediate response to some message.
If I wanted to be socializing, I'd be downtown drinking coffee at the First Street Cafe. If I'm sitting at my computer, it's because I'm doing something else -- and yet, matters are evolving to where I can be annoyed then in a way that will be almost impossible to ignore (although some entrepreneur will doubtless sell something that works like a telephone answering machine for those instant messages).
All this is starting to remind me of the competition in armaments before World War I. A munitions maker would announce a shell that would penetrate any armor. A shipmaker would then announce a battleship with armor that could repel any shell. Then came the announcement of a new shell, etc.
This competition between you and the people who want to profit by shoving something into your face -- it's brutal, and sensible people are trying to avoid it. So it's little wonder that the Internet, the hottest thing in the history of the world a couple of years ago, now wants a day of charity.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >