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A company in Omaha, Nebraska, claims to have put on the Web the numbers for "every business telephone in the USA." While the big telcos were sleeping, a small company has done the obvious. Now how long will it be before another small company put up phone numbers for the entire world -- and not just business, everyone?
Through forms-based queries, you can check schedules and availability for airlines, trains, rental cars, and hotels. In some cases, apparently, you can make reservations on-line. I haven't used it to plan a trip yet, but it looks very tempting. The question is -- how complete is it? Just like phone books (as above), you'd like to go to one site to get the info and make the reservations for travel anywhere.
A grassroots, non-profit organization makes lots of environmental information available on-line, and tries to build a "community" of like-minded people.
"MendelWeb is a teaching and learning 'sourcebook' built upon Gregor Mendel's famous pea plant paper of 1865, and designed to show how primary texts can be used to construct educational resources that take advantage of hypertext, the connectivity of the World Wide Web, and the collaborative possibilites of the Internet."
This center addresses the communication needs of people who are "non-speaking and have severe disabilities." They study the ways in which these people can converse and write, including the use of high-technology communication aids.
Short, critical reviews for commercial Web sites. If you are interested in where the Internet is headed and what it means to business, you should check here regularly.
Check here for weird and fascinating stats and facts, which chronicle the growth and evolution of the Internet.
The presidential election campaign is on-line here -- with news, background, and the opportunity to interact with others in Forums. Some of these Forums are for the candidates to debate with one another, and other are for folks like you -- or your students -- to express their views. If you feel strongly about a political issue, you can either post your opinions in a newsgroup or post them here -- the difference is that here there's a good chance that the candidates and/or their staff will see what you have to say.
If enough people joined in, this could be an effective, no-cost way to lobby on issues of importance to the Internet community. In any case, it's a great way to introduce students to the notion of grassroots electronic democracy.
This project is "following a team of airborne astronomers as they fly across the United States, conducting infrared astronomy research at 41,000 feet." Under way right now, the project includes live television, printed teacher's guides, lots of on-line background information, and the opportunities to pose questions to the researchers on-line. (For those who cannot access or download this material directly, the teacher's guide and all the supporting material from the Web site is available on IBM/Mac diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK. Send email to samizdat@samizdat.com for details.)
Here you'll find pointers to numerous sites with material useful in teaching social studies (US and world history, economics, anthropology, psychology, geography, and sociology), including on-line student projects. There's also a section dealing specifically with the state of Washington.
Check their 1996-97 Global Ecology Course Catalog.
Lessons and background material from the last four seasons of this television show broadcast over PBS in the US.
This one-person operation produces a "science digest" which filters and selects material from the net. It is intended to "stimulate the quest for a new way to do science, in spite of the deluge of information going on in our society, by trying to become a true 'global scientist-philosopher with a new attitude toward 'knowledge compression' instead of the current trend towards lengthy essays, confused repetitions, unuseful publications."
Here you find hyperlinks to a variety of useful, free services available on the Web. "To be included on this page, a free service must do more than provide on-line information; it must perform a customized service for the user. Services on this page don't just tell you something, or let you tell someone else something; they do something for you. Most importantly, they do it for free." There's lot's of good stuff here, including their own "URL-minder" (see below).
This is an almost great idea. You find a Web page with great stuff, but you don't want to bother to keep going back until there's something new there. It would be handy to get a brief email reminder when more of what you want to see is available. Netmind provides these kinds of alerts as a free service. (Apparently, they plan to make their money by attaching paid advertising messages to the email reminder notes.) You can register at their site for whatever Web pages you want to be notified about. And if you have your own Web sites, you can download a brief chunk of code from Netmind and cut and paste into your pages, so visitors at your site will be able to fill out a short form and get alerted about your pages.
This looked so good, we tried it at our site for a few weeks. The problem is that any simple cosmetic or maintenance change in your pages triggers a message to all the folks who said they were interested. So what should be helpful tool, turns out to be a nuisance.
All they'd need to do to make this much better, would be to allow the person maintaining a page to make a judgement as to whether a change was worthy of note.
NetBuddy is a very different approach to the problem noted above -- finding out when sites you are interested in have been updated. In this case, you download a free program (for Windows 3.1), and this software "watches the web for you." "NetBuddy keeps a list of Internet web locations which you want it to watch. Then it automatically checks these sites at a frequency you decide. If any of these sites have changed (have new information), NetBuddy lights up that site in its list to let you know something's different there." Unfortunately, this approach has the same drawback as the URL-minder -- every little cosmetic, maintenance change to a page looks the same as if significant content had been added.
A gem I found from the Netmind free services page, Tiger lets you create custom maps of territory within the US and download them for free. This could be very helpful in geography and history classes, as well as for those who would like to include public domain maps in their Web pages.
This is probably the best free Internet search service available today. It's easy to use, and must have an enormous data base to find some of the stuff it comes up with. But it also has an annoying quirk -- results aren't repeatable. For instance, a few days ago I did a search for "electronic texts on diskette" and found excerpts from nearly every issue of Internet-on-a-Disk and the PLEASE COPY THIS DISK catalog. Today I did the exact same search and found none of those documents. Likewise, yesterday, for the fun of it, I searched for "the meaning of life,"; and the first hit was a fun one -- a site that will send you email alerts whenever the meaning of life changes. I tried the same search today, and all I got was pointers to information on life insurance.
This software lets you save Web pages locally on your PC so you can display them later with your Web browser even if you don't have an Internet connection. You can produce similar results by brute force -- renaming files same in disk cache and changing all the links to graphics images etc. so they point locally -- but this software makes it all very easy and quick. I use it to capture examples I want to use in delivering speeches and presentations about what's happening on the Internet. )
This tool could also be very useful for teachers, who may have access to a computer for classroom use, but probably don't have a phone line or Internet connection in the classroom. From a PC at home or in the library or computer center, you can find the pages you want to show in class and save them on a diskette. Then, in class, using a PC with a Web browser (such as Netscape 2.0) you can open local files on your diskette -- giving the full impact of Web-based images and information, with all the look and feel of a live connection.
The beta version of this software is available to download for a free 30-day trial; then, if you want, you can buy it from them on-line. (This is the second piece of software which I have bought on-line. The first was the Internet Phone).
The latest (beta) version of Netscape's Navigator has some very useful new features. For instance, you can now access local files with your browser even when you are not connected to the Internet (see the note on Webwhacker above). You can also easily convert documents from .html to plain text, just using the "save as" function. (Before when we downloaded a book from a Web site, we had to use separate .html conversion software to do this, and the results were nowhere near as good as this, in terms of keeping line breaks and paragraph breaks where they belong). In addition, you can do all your email -- including reading new mail -- right from your browser (it's in the set of choices under "Window"). And as a side-effect of that new mail capability, mail messages that you send from your browser -- for instance, from clicking on a "mailto" link on a Web page -- are saved as sent-mail. Also, when you print a document from the Web, this browser prints at the top of each page the name of the site and the URL.
On the negative side, remember this is "beta" software. It still has some bugs. (I find that it intermittently crashes -- but just starting up again is not trouble).
Also, keep in mind that the numerous servers from which they are making this available are in heavy demand. Don't be surprised if you can't get through except at 3 AM. But it's well worth the hassle to get it.
Here is a "kick the tires" version of the same software that's being used by Foster's Daily Democrat (see Educational Resources). The software resides on the Web server. All the user needs is a regular Web browser (like Netscape's Navigator). With this software, you can make your Web site interactive -- letting users exchange views with other users and with experts. There's a wide range of possible applications from customer support to collaboration to distance education. This is a site for you to check out the capabilities and ask the developers questions.
"The cartoons on this page are free to use in your school newspaper, magazine, or newsletter (both print and on-line)! Use as many as you like, as often as you like! .. Also, anyone and everyone can feel free to put a link on your homepage (also for free) to any of the cartoons below." Why wait for an editor or a syndication company to "discover" you, when you can build a reputation for free by making your current work available for free over the Internet?
These folks act as hyperlink brokers. They have signed up hundreds of Web sites. They go to potential advertisers and offer them a package deal. For $X per month, you can have hyperlinks to your Web site from Y Web sites which attract the kinds of audiences you want to appeal to. The revenue is shared with the Web sites, which have the right to refuse any advertiser they don't feel is appropriate for them.
They contacted us about a month ago, and now already we have our first "advertiser" -- The Encyclopedia Britannica. For including a hypertext link to their site (with a little graphic), we receive $45 a month. That's not bad considering the run our entire Web site on free space that we get with our $29 a month SLIP account with TIAC. So our one advertiser more than pays for our Internet access and our Web space. And the advertiser is a company we're glad to help promote -- they have a site that we have wanted to point to anyway as an important educational resource (http://www.eb.com/ )
Well, if you learn anything from dealing with the Internet and human behavior there, it's that you've got to expect the unexpected and adjust quickly to change.
So is advertising "in" now? Is that the way to go?
I've heard people comparing hits or visits at a Web site to responses to a direct mail campaign. That seems far-fetched -- not the right ballpark, not the right order of magnitude in terms of predicting audience behavior.
The first-time visitor who clicks to your site by way of a hyper-banner does so on random impulse. You've generated some street traffic by making it easy for people to impulsively move in your direction from some other site -- a click costs the user little time and almost no effort -- little thinking is involved -- curiosity is enough.
When you buy an ad on television or in a newspaper, you are buying an opportunity to catch the attention of an established audience. When you buy a hyper-banner on the Internet, you buy an opportunity to induce people to come to your site and be (at least once) part of your audience. You have not yet begun to catch their attention.
A reminder and invitation to check a website (not a direct ad for a product or service) is a step or two removed from traditional advertising. It is audience acquisition for another program.
Once they "hit" your site, you have an opportunity to catch their interest, to provide them with useful information or an enjoyable experience or a discussion with people of like mind. You have earned a chance to give them good reason to come back again and again to your site. If, at that point, you simply shove a blatant ad in their face or ask them to fill out a long form before you let them see or do anything else, you could be throwing away that opportunity.
In other words, a hyper-banner is a "hit-vitation," an invitation to hit another site. And the success of this approach does not mean that blatant advertising is thriving on the Internet.
In the Hit-vitation business, you are in do-it-yourself mode. Your Web site is the equivalent of a publication or a broadcast station -- run by you. You need to build an audience -- by serving an audience -- before you can expect to get results. And raw hits -- randomly gleaned from pointers and paid-for banner links -- are not an audience, they are just an opportunity to build an audience.
Generating hits by way of hyperlink invitations is analogous to acquiring a list of prospects for one-time direct-mail use. These people have not yet even seen, much less read, an ad or marketing material, and the vast majority, once at your site, will do the equivalent of throwing your marketing material in the wastebasket. In other words, this is a step removed from direct mail responses, and marketers should set their expectations of results accordingly.
At this point in the evolution of commerce on the Internet, the experience of the user with a Web site is simply too complex to reduce to statistics. For the long term, success should be measured not by hits or visits but by some index of user loyalty -- how likely they are to retun again and again. For today, remember that if you pay for a banner/link, you are sending out invitations to anyone and everyone to click on over to your site and take a look. And what that's worth to you depends on what you have at your site -- how useful and compelling people find it.
I still believe that the most interesting opportunities on the Internet are likely to come from serving audiences rather than selling advertising.
In my ideal model, you provide a place where people can interact with one another about matters of common interest; you provide related free information and useful pointers; and once you have built an audience and interact with those people regularly, you begin to provide them with services and products which they need. The better you serve them, the more likely you are to be successful. And in this mode very small operations could be very profitable and very beneficial as well.
To participate in an on-line Forum with Richard Seltzer, discussing the use of the Internet for business and the future direction of the Internet, click here.
The Internet allows individuals to return to first days of driving (a.k.a. teenagers) when "cruising" in and of itself was compelling. While cruising, we looked at all the signs. They were new, exciting and had never been seen from the drivers seat. A great way to just enjoy ourselves as we thrilled at the freedom. Computers prior to the Internet didn't allow us much freedom, you know. We saw the same view of office applications and accounting programs, spreadsheets, lists, etc.
When we first drove our cars, we may have driven by those signs thousands of times and driven into a few parking lots and browsed in some stores. Slowing to check things out, talking with people on the sidewalk - just enjoying the thrill. The places we checked out had a high degree of relationship to our interests.
As we matured though, driving became routine and lost some of its thrill and excitment. We went from one place to another because we had a purpose. Sometimes that purpose was to browse or loose ourselves for few hours in a Mall or store that we liked, but most often it was guided by a very specific purpose. When driven by such a purpose, every red light, yellow light, traffic jam and small yellow volkswagon in front of us proved a maddening distraction. Eventually we stop only where we have a purpose.
Much of what we're pursuing with the Internet today is an attempt to match our Internet content and services to purposes which people find compelling in their lives. For the consumer market this will not be an easy task.
The business user will benefit significantly in the short term for all the reasons you've described before.
Obviously, we need to understand more about the habits and effects of maturation of the Internet driver. I know I still act like a teenager sometimes, clicking and clicking and clicking... But when I'm looking for specific information on a company or a product - I want it NOW (one click away). Long delays (regardless what the cause) drive me to look for a horn to blow or some gesture to make at some faceless Webmaster in the sky. I maintain my hot list and constantly scribble URLs to avoid those long lines.
As a marketeer, I know there is power in this new medium. Measuring its effectiveness will keep us all employeed for many years to come. I agree with your concept that return is important. But as in life on the road, for some sites how often is not so important -- pure hits may be. The type of site is a critical component in measuring how successful it is. For example, a site which provides information for a specific event might be effectively measured on total hits, while a commercial site offering a variety of information over time might be better measured by some combination of new hits and returns.
Over time we'll see an evolution of sites and a maturity of users. As with any new market, niches will evolve that we can't anticipate today and specialized services will develop to meet these needs. For us the challenge is to keep looking to identify these trends and help characterize them, measure their success and build (as we say) compelling solutions.
Just a few thoughts...
We hope that by sharing our experiences we can help one another make better use of this strange and exciting new medium. And at the same time, this is a vehicle for those who run Web sites to let people know what they're doing and why, and why people should visit.
We're calling this project "Real Results: The directory of successful Web sites." Please spread the word.
The simplest way to do this is with the Web site known as Submit It! This is a forms-based way to submit information about a new Web site to the following directory sites: Yahoo, Starting Point, WebCrawler, EINet Galaxy, Lycos, Harvest, What's New Too! Infoseek, Whole Internet Catalog, Open Text Web Index, World Wide Web Worm, Apollo, Jump Station, New Rider's WWW Yellow Pages, The YellowPages.com, Netcenter, NIKOS, and Pronet.
Expect a 2-4 week delay from when you submit the information to when people can find you through one of these directories.
Other important ones not in Submit-It include: NCSA's What's New page (now run by GNN), the Commercial Sites Index (run by Open Market), and Excite
You also should consider getting listed in "Malls" -- many of which consist largely of pointers to other sites and many of which provide these pointers for free. For a list, check the Index of Commerical Databases and Malls, posted by the Multimedia Marketing Group http://hevanet.com/online/com.html
And keep in mind that American Business Information in Omaha, Nebraska, has made available the Yellow Pages of the entire United States on the Web. Apparently, even if you aren't in the printed yellow pages, you can still get a free listing here by filling out their form. http://www.telephonebook.com
With another free announcement service -- PostMaster at http://www.netcreations.com/postmaster/index.html -- you fill out one form and your announcement is posted to 100 popular Web sites and publications on the Internet and also goes to 300+ editors at print publications and broadcast stations.
Keep in mind that the "one click reaches everybody" approach means you can't tailor your messages for the audience and your submission looks the same as hundreds of others and hence might not be noticed. It also means you don't know who gets your messages, so you can't track success.
It's hard work to do it all individually by hand, but the payoff is likely to be greater. And there are service companies that will help you for a fee (check Netpost at http://www.netpost.com ).
The group for general announcements of new Web sites is: comp.infosystems.www.announce
Always read samples from a newsgroup before posting there to make sure your message is appropriate and so you can tailor your message to the audience. You can probably get a list of newgroups from your newsreader software or your Internet provider. Another source on the Web, which also has useful how-to and netiquette explanations is at the University of Indiana -- http://scwww.ucs.indiana.edu/NetRsc/usenet.html
For example, if you site is non-commercial and related to education, you might want to try some of the following: k12.ed.soc-studies (social studies), k12.chat.teacher (teachers), k12.library (school librarians), alt.education.alternative , or alt.education.distance
Two of the many sites which maintain lists of such email lists and instructions on how to use them are: http://www.nova.edu/Inter-Links/listserv.html and http://tile.net/listserv They can tell you the right format in which to send your email messages to subscribe and unsubscribe to these groups. Some require you to be a subscriber before you can post, and others are open to any appropriate postings. Be sure not to post a commercial message to a clearly non-commercial list or you will get inundated with hate mail. And beware of subscribing to too many lists yourself -- a single list might generate dozens of messages a day, which is great if you're very interested in the subject matter, but otherwise soon becomes a nuisance. And if you do send messages to these lists, keep them as short as possible, as a courtesy to others. If you want to convey a long message, point them to a site where they can fetch it, or invite individulas to send you email requesting that document.
One of my favorite lists is internet-marketing@popco.com (discussions of business on the Internet), which also has it's own Web site http://www.popco.com/hypernet/inet-marketing
Some non-commercial lists related to education include:
Here's a list of some of them, with the email addresses of editors. Be sure to read the publications before sending them email:
[We have posted this document on our Web site at http://www.samizdat.com/public.html We plan to update and maintain these lists regularly (within the limits of our very limited time) as a free service. Please alert us to other resources that should be included.]
The central "hacker" (handle = Zero Cool) gets in trouble with the Feds at the age of 11 and is prohibited by the court from getting near a computer until age 18. What story there is starts when he has just turned 18, has just moved to a new city with his divorced mother, and is a newcomer at the public high school, where he gets involved with other "hackers."
Their "hacking" is mainly telephone-based pranks. The technology is reminiscent of the Three Days of the Condor -- twenty years old. They use cassette recorders to capture the sounds of money being deposited in a touchtone pay phone, and play it back to get money refunded when they never made a deposit. They use modems to access and change school grades and class registration. One of them breaks into a supercomputer -- guessing that the password for the system manager would be GOD (as if a major, security-sensitive computing site these days would allow anyone to have a three-letter password, much less one that's a common noun). To prove he was there to his buddies, he tries to download a "garbage" file. The owner of that file in fact had stored there some sensitive information related to a personal nefarious scheme. To get the Feds involved to help him get the file back, he sets loose a virus that he designed himself and claims the "hacker" did it. The Feds are creepy imbeciles. The pranksters are more interested in one-upping one another than in foiling the bad guy or getting away from the Feds (and their pranks are like playing their equivalent of scavengerhunt videogames using phone lines to break into systems). And the bad guy, with his convoluted motivation is simply pathetic. Hence, there's no central conflict -- just a string of episodes.
Technology-wise, there was hardly any mention of the Internet -- it was all direct-dialup to a modem at the target site. (For instance, they make a phone call to a security guard and trick him into telling them the dialup number for the top secret computer -- real high tech).
Worst of all, whenever they show a computer in action, they put ludicrous graphics on the screen, apparently to show that it's "doing something." It's like a 1950's sci-fi movie notion of what a computer is and how it works.
From: Dave Fawthrop <hyphen@ibmPCUG.CO.UK>
Kirk.Laughlin@franklin.pacsci.org and daniel@sierra.net are worried as to what will happen to writers, if the text of books are freely available on the net. Let them take courage from the situation in the United Kingdom. Libraries here, which I frequent, are public institutions, and free at the point of borrowing, being paid for by local and general taxation. This has been so for perhaps a century.
The effect of this on authors has not been catastrophic. Numerous bookshops, which I use occasionally, still thrive. Authors except for a few bestsellers, still complain that they are underpaid. They have however won a small victory recently. They receive a very small sum from the government depending on how many times their books are borrowed.
Your correspondents also, do not take into account the fact that, E-text is perhaps the least convenient form of text for actual *reading*, as against consulting technical literature. Indeed as a Sci-Fi addict, and computer professional, I have not -- to date -- attempted to read any of the e-text material available in that genre.
Why?? It is difficult to read on a screen even with a good editor and font. Taking a computer, even a portable to bed is just not on!! The costs in money, time and effort of local printing and worse binding is quite significant.
Free Etext will cause the situation of writers to change, but not by much.
From: geof@netcom.com (Geoffrey F. Pawlicki, Project Gutenberg)
Just read you latest [#12] and wanted to say congrats for your recent naming to the top 50 list ... and also to offer the, albeit obvious, suggestion that you keep the 'all content' perspective as a 'signature' item on your homepage. ...
Further, in response to the fellow whom you published in #12,
"...It is one thing to imagine, even with logical trappings, what you think should happen as a result of making the printed word free. It is another thing to actually live the life of a writer, or musician, in a world where his product, unlike all others, is incapable of creating a material reward."
I should like to point out the maxim that 'detail costs' with regard to music as well as the visual arts, and that many of the questions addressed in terms of free vs. fee are mostly an issue of how much work is needed to assert copyright, e.g., listenability, originality, 'genius', timeless classic, etc.
From: sheridan@k12.oit.umass.edu (Susan Rich Sheridan ,Westfield State)
I just got on the World Wide Web for the first time. Your discussions and the responses to your discussions on the changing nature of publishing were fascinating. I have been trying for about 30 years to get published. This year, I have decided to self-publish. The first book coming out in Feb. is a book on drawing and writing, which I have worked on through my doctorate and a summer Bread Loaf program at Oxford for the past 5 years. I hired a fellow to use Quark to set it up visually, and I have scanned in student drawings. I am fully self-publishing, building a tiny team of editors, and technicians. But I am going to get this handbook on visual and verbal literacy out. I have approached publishers for 5 years on this. I have about 100 peole who want the book to teach from. So, I decided to do this myself. Next, comes a novel. Then poetry.
I think Barney's letter to you, and others I have just read are very interesting. I would like to be able to sell this handbook for a nominal price - that is, I am a single parent now, a solo self supporter, an adjunct professor (which means I make about $10,000 per year), and I have to figure out how to make a little money. One of my editors said she worked for a guy who wrote a book on memory, writing and older people, and has FRANCHISED the idea. Most startling to think about as an academic. That is, instead of founding some institute to promulgate your idea, just sell it, inexpensively, and let others take it up as a small business. Extremely intersting. The handbook I have written would thus be a kind of seminal franchise how-to text. Anyway. Lots of change in the world of publishing and the dissemination of information.
I think my teaching and learning strategy called drawing/writing needs to get out there before our US educ. system fails entirely to engage kids' minds in their own minds as competent meaning makers - that is, as literate people.
From: Margaret Stimson <mstimson@assd.winnipeg.mb.ca>
Greetings from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In issue #12, Richard Evans noted:
"Intrigued with the prospect of REAL electronic town meetings (where business gets accomplished through the democratic process, not the Ross Perot variety), I'm writing to ask if you are aware of any groups that are applying Robert's Rules (etc.) to their electronic deliberations, and/or whether anyone is working on protocols for doing that? "
While not exactly what was requested, there is a site for an Online Tour of Canada's Parliament. At the bottom of the first page, there is a Glossary to Parliamentary Procedure that may be a good addition to whatever list you may assemble on that topic.
You can reach the site at http://www.cisti.nrc.ca/programs/pio/intro.html I have linked to it from The INFO ZONE at http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/~mstimson/ for the benefit of our students. We would like you to visit us as well!
From: mark@sd.co.il (Mark Levinson)
I found the Robert's Rules site ... The site is "Roberts Rules Made Simple," and it's very abbreviated but the best I've managed to find so far. It belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America: http://ccme-mac4.bsd.uchicago.edu/DSAManuals/Rules/Rules.html
From: Pekka P Pirinen <pekka@harlequin.co.uk>
This [#12] was a particularly good issue, with useful info and thoughtful articles. And I liked "THE WAY OF THE WEB".
As to RULES OF ORDER FOR ELECTRONIC FORUMS, it's good to remember that Robert's Rules are a local institution, practically unknown outside the US. Anyway, people always want to improve on things, and the electronic meetings are probably different enough to require their own rules. Also, they offer the possibility of enforcing the rules by technological means, although I think this is bad idea that will only annoy and frustrate people.
It might be a good idea to look into what kinds of rules IRC channels and MUDs have evolved, although there probably aren't many whose focus would be arriving at decisions.
From: SRCannon@aol.com, - Susan Cannon
Richard, I just read your piece WILL THE REAL TOMORROWLAND PLEASE STEPFORWARD? and wanted to comment on some parts of it.
"We need to remind ourselves that rapid change is part of the human condition. Our current accelerated pace seems especially frantic because our society is emerging from a period when change was relatively predictable. However, in the broad perspective of history, the 'future shock' we are now experiencing is not the exception, but the rule."
I don't believe that rapid change is part of the human condition. It has however, become part of the human condition with the onset of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Capitalism is inherently unstable and by virtue of its structure supports technologically fueled change -- this is the first time in history that such instablility and change were a part of the human condition. Before the onset of capitalism, change was very very slow-- the societal structure and the governing economic systems were stacked against it. For example, there was no incentive for a serf to produce some innovation that would increase productivity, because only the master would benefit. Also, if someone was a member of a craft guild, they were geared to produce only so much stuff, in a certain way. If someone innovated and found a better way, or a more productive way, then what would they do with the excess?. There was no supply-demand market system to distribute the extra.
Wealth was not used to create more wealth- it was used to consolidate power and support a social postion, thus supporting the status quo. In a tradition-based economy, such as exists in some clan societies and in undeveloped areas, the main idea is to do what others have done before you -- strict adherence which is enforced by social pressure. Now that wealth is used to produce more wealth based upon ever-increasing production capability, there exists a powerful incentive for technological innovation. Thus, technology fuels rapid change such as we have never seen before. As a social system, capitalism is extremely unstable, going through spurts of rapid growth and expansion, and hitting periods of stagnation and fall back. Mass unemployment has been its Achilles heel, which Keynsian economics attempted to correct after WWII. It worked for awhile, but technology may cause that to happen again.
"For those of us growing up in middle-class America, the period of twenty years after World War II was an anomaly. The world of 'Father Knows Best' and 'Donna Reed' and 'The Nelsons' was a world where change was incremental and predictable. Cars would get bigger and faster, and highways would be built to accommodate them. Airliners would get bigger and faster, and airports would be expanded to accommodate them. When in the 1950s, General Electric proclaimed, 'Progress is our most important product,' they meant steady, incremental, predictable progress. The original Tomorrowland in Disneyland -- both the theme park and the television show -- was a friendly, familiar place, a way of life you could easily extrapolate from the world you lived in."
The postwar years were an anomaly- but I don't believe that it was because change was incremental. It was not- the sense of stability came, among other things, from the brief period economic prosperity, dominance, and expansion enjoyed by priveledged Americans in that period. Change was rapid and accelerated at that time too.
I agree with your general thesis, but think that your perspectives and certain broad statements should be looked at again.
From: laink@harrier.sasknet.sk.ca (Kieth laing/HRDC)
Hello. I've just finished reading your Sept newsletter [#12] and thoroughly enjoyed it. I run an internal webserver at the office I work in and wonder if your invitation to carry the material that you've posted here on other websites extends to internal websites (websites not on the internet)? In our office we just went to tcp/ip which means for most (99%) of my colleagues this is their first look at web technology-they don't have internet accounts. Your newsletters would be a tremendous boost at showing them some of the best aspects of what the web outside has to offer. Thank you for the good read. I look forward to hearing from you.
REPLY -- I'm glad to hear that you like what you see. Feel free to mirror anything you see on my web site on yours. Richard Seltzer
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, West Roxbury, MA
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