WisdomWorld

written by Cyber5

Before I start my rant and open myself up to public flaming, let me admit that this article is unfortunately hypocritical. It’s not by design, but forced due to my technological background and active involvement with all things computer-related including the World Wide Web as you know it today.

I’m going to bet that most of the people reading this article have no idea of who Tim Berners-Lee is, am I correct? Well then, what are you doing on the WWW anyway? It wasn’t meant for casual surfers, or homepages about your cat, or articles like this one for that matter! It was meant for physicists around the world to easily communicate information, ideas, and technical data amongst themselves. That’s what Tim designed it for back around 1990.

Tim, from what I understand, was awarded top honors in Physics while attending college in England. While working for CERN, a physics lab in Geneva, he invented the WWW that you are now surfing. I’m pretty sure he never meant for things like furby.com or santa.com to be eating up valuable bandwidth on a network that catered mainly to scientists and their supercomputers.

Of course, it’s been almost a full decade since then, and businesses (small and large) have given their stamp of approval on the refined model of the Internet – and are all rapidly gobbling up any dotcom address their highly-paid marketing gurus, secretaries, wives and friends can think up. That’s too bad.

About 5 years ago I stumbled onto the Internet while attending a technical college. I embraced it as a valuable research aid, allowing me to produce technical reports on a myriad of subjects for my classes. I found classmates, now good friends, which also shared my interest and excitement over the new landscape. We perceived our web browsers, gopher and FTP clients as tools that allowed us to “stand on the edge of a new universe and peer in with exacting precision.” Using 14.4k modems, and beta software we could access tons of valuable information on plenty of subjects. Now, we still can, but at the expense of spending huge amounts of time in search engines and wading thru a gazillion advertisements related to nothing we are looking for.

Why? Because the Internet is no longer about sharing information! It’s driven by dollars, not by people questing for and sharing knowledge. The discussions on upcoming protocols and what tools are useful or should be implemented are overshadowed by the never-ending deluge of banner advertisements, useless animated graphics, badly-written java applets, and idiotic meta-word inclusions on almost every web page available.

Mr. Berners-Lee has apparently moved on from his shock of the business-ad trash bin the web has become (or perhaps never cared) and is still trying to make the “most of it” for educational purposes over at MIT.

I, however, still hate the fact that I used to be able to get information from Switzerland, California, New York and Illinois in minutes while surfing at 14.4k, but am now forced to spend precious time downloading 10 stupid advertisements at 56k or even 1.5mbps (T1) to find out the page is useless or is cleverly hiding the entrance to a porn site – thereby making my average useful transfer time equal to about 100bps.

To sum it all up-businesses have ruined the “information age” that was dawning, and superimposed the advertisement age upon those who have modems and Internet access. The supercomputers of the world now spend valuable CPU time cataloging keywords in IBM and Ford ads, instead of calculating the probability of an asteroid impact and its effect on earth as we know it.

If I see one more cereal commercial with a web address on my TV, I’m going to scream! The WWW is for publishing and researching valuable information. If your business or organization has some good info to share with customers – then, by all means publish it! If not, QUIT USING OUR BANDWIDTH!

Now, if you’ll excuse me-I have to go download some recipes from the Food Network, register my new business website name with Internic and design some banner ads.

Cyber5

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