The Way of the Web E-Book

Richard Seltzer

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 118

Beschreibung

The internet emerged and evolved so rapidly, that companies were faced with the need to adapt to a new environment.This early book focuses upon building communities on the Internet. It further provides information on establishing identity, motivation to succeed, and community. First published in 1995, many of the principals explained here still ring true.

Leseprobe

THE WAY OF THE WEBBY RICHARD SELTZER

Published by Seltzer Books

established in 1974, as B&R Samizdat Express

offering over 14,000 books

feedback welcome: [email protected]

Books by the Richard Seltzer available from Seltzer Books

The Name of Hero

Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes (translation from the Russian)

The Lizard of Oz

Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome

Saint Smith and Other Stories

The Gentle Inquisitor and Other Stories

Echoes from the Attic (with Ethel Kaiden)

Web Business Bootcamp (2002)

The Social Web (1998)

The Way of the Web (1995)

Heel, Hitler and Other Plays

Dryden's Exemplary Drama and Other Essays

Copyright © 1995

Epigraph -- "The Way of the Web"Introduction Definitions and OpportunitiesChapter 1 - The Giants Wore VelcroChapter 2 - Wake Up: Tomorrow Happened Yesterday Chapter 3 - Business TrendsChapter 4 - Curious TechnologyChaptrt 5 -  Building Communities on the InternetChapter 6 - New Ways to Perceive CyberspaceChapter 7 - Anonymity for Fun and DeceptionChapter 8 - Identity, Motivation, and Community

Epigraph: The Way of the Web

Who owns the internet? -- No one.

Who controls the Internet? -- No one.

Where is the Internet? -- Everywhere.

Can you understand all and penetrate all with the click of a mouse?

To produce things and to make them well,

but not to sell them,

rather to give them away freely to all,

and by giving to become known and valued;

To act, but not to rely on one's own abilty,

to build on the works and lessons of others,

and to let others do likewise --

this is called the Way of the Web.

The best is like water.

Water benefits all things and does not compete with them.

Water dissolves barriers.

Water reaches out and covers the earth.

This is called the Way of the Web.

INTRODUCTION: DEFINITIONS AND OPPORTUNITIESWe 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.

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 themepark and the television show -- was a friendly, familiar place, a way of life you could easily extrapolate from the world you lived in.

We came to presume that such a level of social, economic, political and technological stability was the norm. As the pace of change has accelerated in recent years, we have had to scramble to cope. And we have come to believe that our situation is unique -- that we are being forced to face more rapid change and more difficult changes than previous generations.

But read Mark Twin's Life on the Mississippi and consider how rapidly the Mississippi steamboat industry rose and fell. Check on the Pony Express which only lasted 17 months before new technology made it obsolete. Read panoramic novels set in the 19th or the early 20th century, and see the world transformed again and again by technology or war or depression.

Rapid and unpredictable change is the norm. Future shock was a shock to those of my generation because we had the luxury of growing up in a time of extraordinary stability and came to expect that similar conditions would continue for the foreseeable future. We didn't develop the skills and attitudes needed to deal with rapid change. We didn't learn to expect the unexpected, to anticipate the rise and fall of entire industries.

Now we live in a world where the growth opportunities are in industries like computers and biotech that barely existed when we were in college. And the basic skills expected in most any job today were not taught when we were in college.

What's happening on the Internet today is both a symptom of the times and an opportunity for many of us to learn, to grow, and to reinvent our lives in greater harmony with the times. This is not a dehumanizing technology, but rather one with the capacity to help us rehumanize life -- the chance for a fresh start.

CHAPTER 1: THE GIANTS WORE VELCO

In 1993 a small change in technology -- the ability to navigate through the Internet by pointing and clicking -- began to make an enormous difference in the worlds of publishing, education, and government. The Internet, which had been a complex, "techie" environment for researchers, became a friendly, easy-to-use multimedia environment -- a new publishing medium, with enormous commercial potential.

Since then the impact has spread to other industries due to innovative use of what was already there, and also due to further expansion and refinement of Internet capabilities to make them more "friendly" to businesses of all kinds. The importance of the Internet continues to grow not only for business, but also as an integral part of the daily lives of millions of people.

What is this phenomenon? What does it mean to us? How can we use it? Where is it going?

While it's based on computer networking technology, businesses and individuals who are capitalizing on the Internet today often have little or no knowledge of or interest in that technology. In the words of Robert Burton, "a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."

For instance, when I needed to check that quote, all I had to do was click my mouse a few times to connect to the Internet and go to a site at Columbia University (the Bartleby Project), which has a searchable on-line version of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (from an old, public domain edition). It took me less than two minutes to make the connection and find the quotation. To do so cost me nothing, and I didn't need to know anything about how computers and networks work.

Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And yes, that has been the nature of the advancement of human knowledge for centuries. The difference is that today the giants seem to be wearing velcro, because it's far easier to stand on those shoulders without falling off.

This means that almost anyone can play in an arena that used to be reserved for scientists and leaders in other fields of human endeavor -- helping to advance the realization of the potential not just of themselves as individuals, but also of humanity as a whole.

To understand what is happening now, where the Internet is headed, and what it could and should mean to us, we need to start with a few non-technical definitions. Such a beginning is important not just to novices, but also to those who feel they are already experts. Because this phenomenon is so immense, you can view it from many different perspectives, and how you see it strongly influences how you will use it. So rather than arguing like blind men when first confronted with an elephant, we'll define our perspective at the same time as defining the Internet.

Definition of the Internet

Networks tie together computers so they can share information and serve as communication devices. If my computer is connected to a network, then the words and images displayed on the screen on my desk may actually reside on another computer miles or even continents away.

Physically, the Internet is a network of networks. While on-line services targeted at individual users, such as CompuServe and America-on-Line, grow one user at a time, the Internet grows an entire network at a time as companies connect their existing networks to the Internet. It now has an estimated 40 million users worldwide, but by the time you read this that number will be much larger, because it is growing at a rate of over six percent -- well over a million users -- a month, with no slowdown in sight.

By the way, the on-line services, which originally had limited connections to the Internet itself (like ponds and lakes with small canals leading to the ocean), are now adding full Internet access to the range of services they offer their customers.

The Internet has no central point of control or governing body. Its anarchic structure derives from the U.S. Department of Defense, which funded its beginnings and wanted a network which could not be knocked out in a nuclear war.

Since 1993, commercial use of the Internet has grown considerably. The U.S. government at first tried to reserve for just education and research those pieces of the Internet which it funded. But it has turned away from that position, reducing its subsidy, limiting its role, and encouraging commercialization. Commercial Internet providers -- independent companies which cooperate through an organization known as the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) -- have been making it increasingly easy for companies to connect to the Internet and conduct business there. And large telecommunications companies are playing an ever increasing role in making it easier and less expensive to access the Internet. As the business potential becomes ever more obvious, you can expect many more companies, of all sizes, to get into the act through acquisitions and new ventures. And except in cases where government regulation interferes, you can expect this lively competition to drive down costs and improve service, while the capabilities offered and the technical demands they make on the providers continue to expand.

Internet Culture

Keep in mind that the Internet is not just a network of computers, it is also a network of people, with its own unique culture. While the underlying technology will change and the companies providing the infrastructure and the access will change, the culture -- the Internet style of work and way of people interacting with other people -- is likely to endure even when the physical Internet becomes enmeshed with and indistinguishable from other communications/publishing/entertainment networks.

This is a statement of faith rather than an empirical fact -- while technologies converge, the unique Internet culture is likely to evolve and propagate and influence how we do business and how we relate to one another for a long time to come.

If you choose to enter this environment, it is important to keep its origins in mind and respect the basic culture. Entering this space is like entering any other culturally foreign environment -- like a Western firm going to Japan. Yes, you can do business there; but to succeed, you must understand and respect the culture -- the etiquette (called "netiquette" here) and the expectations of potential customers.

Here people often freely share their creative efforts, with no expectation of financial return. One finds here a frontier spirit -- the people tend to be independent, self-reliant, but ready to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Surprisingly, new users, even commercial users, often adopt many of the basic tenets of this electronic society, with all the passion of the newly converted.

For example, here one does not send unsolicited advertising material. People welcome information that they have asked for, but raise a storm of protest when someone intrudes upon their space uninvited. (This effect is partly cultural and partly economic. Commercial services, such as CompuServe, which cater to the individual rather than to companies, sometimes charge recipients for the mail they receive, beyond some minimal level. And no one likes to pay for advertising they don't want to see.)

Changes in the Internet

The Internet has existed for a couple of decades. People exchanged mail and made files -- vast libraries of information -- available so others could share them. But since 1993, two factors have fueled enormous growth, and attracted new commercial uses. The U.S. Federal government -- spurred on by both the Clinton-Gore administration and Republicans such as Newt Gingrich, as well -- has made vast amounts of public information -- which had been difficult or expensive to find and use -- freely available in electronic form on the Internet. And at the same time, a piece of software known as "Web browsers" have helped transform this information environment and make it readily usable by people with no knowledge of or interest in computers.

Researchers at CERN, the high energy physics center in Geneva, had developed the World Wide Web (WWW) -- software which made it possible to link information from computers anywhere on the Internet in a hypertext environment. For example, a word in a document on a computer in France could be connected to a document in Australia.

Mosaic, the first of the Web browsers, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) in Illinois. It and its successors (such as the Netscape Navigator) let you use a computer mouse to point-and-click your way freely through that World Wide Web.

The Web is server software which resides on the computer system which is providing the information. The browsers are client software which reside in your desktop computer system and let you navigate through the Web.

Funded by the U.S. government, NCSA made Mosaic available for free over the Internet. By the fall of 1993, they had produced versions of Mosaic that ran on IBM-compatible personal computers, Macintoshes, UNIX workstations, VMS workstations, and other desktop systems. Anyone with the technical ability to download it or who can obtain a copy from a friend is welcome to it. (If you wish to include it in products you charge for, however, you need to negotiate with NCSA for a license). The fact that this client software is free can greatly reduce the cost and speed the development of information systems.

With the World Wide Web and Web browsers, the global book/library of the future is quickly becoming a reality.