1999: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
In the 1999 podcast, “From Papyrus to Cyberspace”, James O’Donnell describes that particular year as “poised between doom and utopia”(O’Donnell, 1999). Though we no longer use the term cyberspace much, and have deferred to the more direct “Internet”, and it is still somewhere between doom and utopia, here in 2015 we no longer think that it has the potential to reach either extreme. O’Donnell, along with James Engell, compare the burgeoning state of the Internet in 1999 to that of the advent of the printing press, to codex, and before that, even to the rise of writing itself. I will argue that 1999 is nearly as far removed from the present situation as was the rise of Christianity attributed to codex that O’Donnell speaks about in his lecture and those other benchmarks in communication. I’m going to use 16 years of hindsight to here to critique some of O’Donnell’s and Engell’s assertions. As we shall see below, many of O’Donnell’s predictions have come true while those of Engell have not come to pass. I agree with O’Donnell’s thesis that all new technologies bring certain benefits while others die off with the old technology but won’t address it beyond that here.
O’Donnell describes the Internet in 1999 as a “new, freer, better world” (O’Donnell, 1999) comparable the wild west. He continues the metaphor with pornography and hackers as the outlaws and bandits and, one would suppose, academics and entrepreneurs as cowboys. The settlement or establishment of the Internet has indeed come to pass with corporations that are more powerful than nations (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon, to name a few) that have arisen from the web. They claim larger and larger tracts of cyberspace, by gaining more control over where and how web users usually spend their time. But pornography and hackers are still out there, just as there is still crime in cities such as Houston and Albuquerque that were once part of the wild west.
Engell denies claims by critics of the Internet worrying about the potential for the Internet to replace books. “When you walk into a library, soon everything will be on a screen — how wrong they were” (O’Donnell, 1999). I will contend that while books are still pretty common, “they” were right and Engell was wrong. Almost all the libraries I have seen in Toronto public schools now centre around computer labs, with a few books off to the side. The main function of today’s library, at least in an elementary school setting, is to provide students with computer access rather that books.
When predicting how widespread Internet use would become, Engell stated “it’s important to be humble” (O’Donnell, 1999). I don’t know where the notion of humility fits in, but his prediction of 700 million users, or 10% of the population, fell far short of the 1 billion people that were actually online in 2005 (Internet Live Stats, 2015), and far shorter still from the 3.2 billion, or over 40% of humans, who are online today.
So, just as Christianity is so entrenched around the world that we no longer question it’s rise or origins, the same is true of the Internet. When one opens a bible, no one thinks, “Thank codex for convincing the Romans to adopt this religion and taking out all those pagans”, and when one opens a Facebook page, no one thinks, “Thank Zuckerburg for taming the wild Internet frontier and organizing all my friends and targeting specific ads at me”. Though I may be as far off as Engell, I predict that the Internet in the next 16 years will become faster and have more and better audio-visual content, but will not change nearly as much as it has in the last 16.
References:
Engell, J & J. O’Donnell. (1999). From Papyrus to Cyberspace [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from: https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_75468_1&content_id=_2913588_1&framesetWrapped=true.
Internet Live Stats. (2015). Internet Users. Retrieved from: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/
Great post Randy. It is remarkable how right and wrong Engell and O’Donnell were. I think Engell was pretty smart in projecting a humble estimation of the impact of the “cyberspace”, but I also think that the current landscape, particularly in regard of the participation of gatekeepers such as Google or Amazon, went totally unpredicted. Thanks again for your post.