Common Ground: May 04, 1998 issue of New Thinking

May 04, 1998 New Thinking:
Common Ground

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May 04, 1998

Common ground

By Gerry McGovern

Everybody in the tech industry is looking at the Internet and trying to make it ‘better.’ My worry is that in their frenzy to make the Internet better, the tech industry is in danger of killing the goose.

I think that the Internet is fantastic and incredible as it stands. I am genuinely worried that if too many of these snazzy and often ‘proprietary’ tools get their little hands imbedded in the Internet, they will rip it apart.

The Internet is the most amazing resource for communication and the dissemination of information. Much information can be delivered with text and simple graphics. In fact, I can’t remember an instance where I was dissatisfied with information I found on the Internet, in the sense that I needed to hear it or see it better visually presented.

Now, I’m not saying that these circumstances do not occur for many people. They absolutely do. What I am saying is that it is surprising the information value you can deliver using a basic website structure and a limited bandwidth environment. If people focused on being more inventive within these limitations, instead of constantly moaning about not being able to ‘do multimedia,’ they might surprise themselves with what they’d achieve.

The Internet has taken the world by storm because it creates common ground. Never forget that. Never, ever forget that. The Internet wiped the floor with other systems, forced Microsoft and others to develop ‘for’ and not ‘against’ it, because it was open and not proprietary.

Creeping into the Internet these days are those old Industrial Age primal proprietary urges. At a basic level you see the ‘Best Viewed With XXX Browser’ insults. Some sites won’t even let you in unless you download some plug-in. They even insult you by saying that they’re doing it for your better enjoyment. (As if waiting twenty minutes to download something is fun!)

Let’s imagine the world today without the wheel. We have computers and everything fancy but we don’t have the wheel. Then, someone comes down the road on an ass and cart. Two wheels! Amazing. All these fancy computers, nuclear power, walking on the moon, must step aside to make place for the ass and cart and its monumental wheels.

The Internet is a bit like the ass and cart of the digital age. It’s not as smooth as we’d like, it’s not as fast as we’d like, it doesn’t do everything we’d like. It will mature, give it time. But it has these wonderful wheels of communication and information dissemination. And it can reach practically every country and practically every computer in the world. That is the true magic of the Internet – it’s the Great Connector.

The Barbarians are at the firewall. They’re trying to turn the Internet into a mass of fiefdoms. Over here we have the kingdom of the high bandwidth, over here the Pentium tribe, and here we have those with version 4 browsers, and down there its those riff-raff with 486s.

Too many are still thinking me instead of network. Too many can’t figure out that to share, interact and create more common ground is the ultimate way of creating value in the network that is the Internet that is the digital age.

Gerry McGovern

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