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It's all lunatics and liars
While millions of everyday people got online for the first time this year for mundane purposes like sending e-mail and booking flights on the Web, some media outlets stuck to their old line: The Web is a haven for weirdos. When Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven's Gate followers performed their bizarre and sad mass suicide last spring, some commentators -- particularly on TV -- jumped at the discovery that the cultists had run a Web-design business as proof of the medium's inherent lunacy. A few months later, the "beware the Net" crowd jumped at the news that a little-known journalist's commencement-day address was circulating online under the byline of novelist Kurt Vonnegut: further proof, they crowed, that you can't trust everything you read on the Net. Well, duh! (S.R.) Raise your standard high
Java started the year as the programming language that promised to bring true cross-platform compatibility -- allowing the creation of software products that developers could "write once, run anywhere." By the end of the year Sun was running ads touting its version of Java as "100 percent pure," while Microsoft proceeded with its own different-enough-to-cause-problems version. As with the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, Java's looming disintegration reminds us of a sad truth in the technology biz: Everyone wants universal standards. Everyone loves competition. The two concepts, alas, always seem to be at war with each other. (S.R.) Sex sells -- or does it? The most ironic story of 1997 was the dramatic growth in the availability of online pornography, both for free and for fee. The surge can be traced directly back to the judicial override of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, finalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. Before the CDA, nobody knew what was legal and what wasn't, and sex merchants kept a low profile. But the attempt to outlaw all "indecency" ended up clearing the path, for now, for the online sex biz. A million sex sites bloomed, as did a million mainstream news stories all making the same point -- that the first sector of the Net economy to show a profit would be the age-old sex industry. But the proliferation of sex sites has proved to be the business's worst enemy: Too much competition has engendered a cut- throat market full of scammers, cheaters and decreasing profit margins for everyone. Ain't capitalism great? (A.L.) The Net economy gathers steam The attention devoted to how sex sells on the Net might make one think that nobody else is making any money at all. But 1997 was the year in which online commerce began to show real signs of strength. Led by innovators like Amazon.com, online stores found that they could build real businesses selling stuff online -- and that customers would even use their credit cards on the Net. Meanwhile, advertising dollars spent on the Net rose from quarter to quarter. The total dollar figures are trifling compared to the offline ad biz, but the growth curve is sharp enough to give encouragement to Web sites trying to build businesses around ad revenue. (A.L.) Check out our new low prices! By now you've probably heard of the "Under $1,000 PC" -- the computer market's biggest-growing niche. What you probably heard was a paean to the technology industry's awesome and accelerating efficiency. Here's what you might not have heard: First, a lot of PC manufacturers snuck under the $1,000 line by the neat little dodge (borrowed from the Apple playbook) of leaving the monitor out of the price. Second, a big reason prices dropped so low so fast was that the market is flooded with low-end Pentium chips. Third, another big reason for the price drop was the sharp decline in RAM prices this year, which altered the price/performance equation across the computer-market board. Everyone loves a cheap PC -- but don't let the manufacturers get away with taking credit for this trend: It caught most of them sleeping at the keyboard. (S.R.) Spam, spam, spam, spam ... The problem of spam -- unsolicited junk e-mail -- became one of the defining issues for the Net in 1997. Although virtually no one enjoys receiving multi-level marketing scams and sex-site come-ons in their electronic mailbox, there is no widely accepted method for dealing with the junk. Net-libertarians decry attempts at governmental regulation as Big Brotherish infringements on cyber-freedom. But no amount of technological defense gimmickry has proven capable of stemming the spam flow. And despite a year of increasingly strident discourse on the subject, after all the shouting, there's still only one effective response: the delete key. (A.L.) More bruises for Apple Apple Computer's downhill trip over the last decade has been so long and agonizing that it's perilous to try to identify turning points. But in 1997 even the most diehard Mac faithful began to quail as their beloved platform took one body blow after another. They could take declining market share; they could take each new turn of the executive suite's revolving door; they could take the dwindling software selection; they could even take the news that Apple had welcomed a relatively small investment from its archenemy Microsoft. But Steve Jobs' mid-year decision to stop licensing the Mac operating system to clonemakers like Power Computing drove many of Apple's flock out the door: The move dashed the last hope that the Mac might grow its own thriving sub-universe of products and services. Think different? Think dumb. (S.R.) Dungeons and Dragons comes of age Online multiplayer gaming, which many analysts long considered a sure-fire "killer app" for Net commerce, has been a bust for years. But 1997 convinced many doubters that things were changing. Even while dedicated online gaming companies like the Total Entertanment Network found themselves forced to lower fees and look for imaginative ways to attract players (TEN even went so far as to inaugurate a "Professional Gamers League"), at least one company, Blizzard Entertainment, struck it rich with Diablo -- a Dungeons and Dragons style role-playing game that encouraged easy interactivity across Blizzard's own Web servers. Diablo reigned at the top of the game charts for most of 1997, sending a clear signal to the rest of the industry that there are bona fide ways to make money from multiplayer gaming. (A.L.) Communities for sale At the start of the year a book called "Net.gain" told online entrepreneurs that if they expected to make money in the new medium they had to do more than produce content or sell stuff -- they had to build community. A buzzword was born. But while high-minded and creative attempts to build real online communities (like Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds) floundered for lack of a clear business plan, pseudo-communities sprouted across cyberspace like so many company towns. "Net.gain" left out one crucial point: It never told the businesspeople that community and commodity aren't interchangeable terms, and in fact are typically at odds. You can promote a community all you want -- but try to sell it and it will disintegrate. (S.R.) Net punditry overload The publishing industry woke up to the Web in a big way this year and shoveled out vast numbers of volumes explaining, extolling or damning the brave new online world. Many were worthless, clueless or pointless. Occasionally, something of value would stick out from the crowd -- typically, when the author was not a prominent scientist or pundit or mogul but just somebody who's worked at ground zero in the digital field and knows how to write. The best "computer books" of 1997 -- like Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" and Steven Johnson's "Interface Culture" -- didn't surf trends or dabble in future scenarios; they digested real human experience in thoughtful ways. (S.R.)
What were your highs and lows of the year online? Come add yours to the list in Table Talk's Digital Culture area. |
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