An interesting article from Newsweek has made it's way onto the internet;

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. 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.

You might have guessed from the CD-ROM reference that this isn't a recent article– it was written by Clifford Stoll, and published in 1995. From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995, to be exact.

The interesting thing is how many of the criticisms still apply. Sure– there are problems which might have seemed insurmountable 15 years ago which have now been solved (for example, the fact that there are now trustworthy ways to send money over the internet), the root of many of the problems remain the same. And it's those roots that are now more interesting than ever.

Pretty much all of the technical problems that were readily identifiable in 1995 have now been solved. But take a look past the issues of whether people will buy airline tickets or talk to their friends over the internet, and ask yourself about the social, human problems still exist, or whether they've been dealt with quite as easily.

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? [...] At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

It's an easy shot to take about the idea of buying books over the internet at a time when eBooks are becoming commonly available– although still some way away from the mainstream. It's not really a technology problem– you can read off an eBook reader screen at the beach. But are you more likely to buy a Kindle, or a laptop/smartphone/tablet, with a full-colour screen that's great for video, photos and web browsing– but not so great for reading text. So to me, the interesting question there is whether people will buy dedicated "reading" devices or multifunctional devices with backlit colour screens. (We've seen that even though people say they prefer records and CDs, they don't keep buying them when they can get downloads...)

And to the other point– it's 15 years on, and we're still debating over whether or not people will buy "newspapers" over the internet. Maybe by the end of the year, if Murdoch's experiment has yielded any results, we'll finally be able to answer that question. (Maybe we'll even see an unexpected reversal; people will buy access to websites in a shop, bundled as a "free" extra when you buy a newspaper...)

There's an idea which is apparently known as Riepl's Law, which states that "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms." The internet won't "replace" the printed word, just like TV didn't replace radio, radio didn't replace print, and the printed word still hasn't replaced the written word– over 500 years since Gutenberg's printing press.

Or, as Douglas Adams put it in 2001, "Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone."

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

I can't disagree with this. Technology is changing education though– but it's not the biggest factor that's changing the classrooms. From what I understand (and I won't pretend to be an expert– but I have friends and parents of friends who work or worked in teaching), the role of the teacher is being changed, from someone who puts together a teaching plan to someone who fits their teachings to tick the boxes on the curriculum, to get their pupils through an increasing number of tests, to get through the likes of OFSTED inspections, to get the average grades up rather than the best individual grades that will realise the potential of a pupil.

Whether this is a long-term administrative plan to prepare the educational system for the shift to a more cost-efficient, cheaper educational system or something else is way outside of my understanding. But the shift doesn't seem to me to be a product of technology- unless you think of the possibilities of the "what if" questions that planning by spreadsheet can offer.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

This leads into what I think is a more important point about the changes that happen with the rise of "virtual communities."

The spreadsheet was the "killer app" of the Personal Computer, and it gave us an ability that I think we tend to take for granted- those "what if" questions that we can easily ask. Tweak a number, watch it cascade through a series of calculations– calculations that you don't need to perform– and see how the bottom line is affected. What you can see is how cutting a tiny corner in a manufacturing process can save a company thousands of pounds when that cost is magnified over the scale of a production line.

But what you don't see is the value of what's lost in the process– the value that you can't figure out a way to measure become invisible in the spreadsheet, so they are considered to be worthless.

In "You are not a gadget", the book I mentioned recently, Jaron Lanier talks about this kind of thing; the bits that are lost in the digitisation of information. Given the choice between meeting someone in the real world or speaking to them online, I don't think many people would consciously choose the latter. But think about the question in another way– if you have one friend who you've communicated with on a daily basis, reading each others Facebook status updates (or Tweets, or emails, or whatever your favoured communications channel is.) And another friend who you haven't heard anything from for a while– one of those people who isn't signed up to a social network, who isn't using email every day– which one are you going to feel the need to make the effort to meet with and see first?

My bet is that you don't even make the choice, because your non-Facebooking friend is getting in touch with you to arrange a drink or something before you've thought about it.

In fact, I'd probably take that line of thinking a step further; in another 15 years, I think most of these problems still won't have been solved. Wonderful things will have been delivered to us by the Googles, Apples and other technological innovators. (The biggest of which in 2025 might not even be familiar today.) We'll have 3D TV, interactive storytelling and ubiquitous mobile internet at speeds faster than our fixed line broadband of today. The idea of Googling with a text based command-line interface will look as archaic as floppy discs, and we'll be laughing at the way we used to have massive computers in boxes that were permanently hooked up to sockets in the walls of our homes.

But will the human problems be solved? Will we be seeing the continued success of online aggregators, freely collecting content from creators and selling the audiences to advertisers while the content itself becomes devalued? Or will we have figured out a way for quality journalism or professional musicianship to earn money for it's creators? For a way to sort the useful, interesting and relevant content from the spam, junk, mindless comments and automated messages from games and applications?

The optimist in me says yes. But the pessimist in me points out that right now, there's no clear sign as to what that answer will look like. Or even what the first step on that particular path will be.