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AFTER THE GOLD RUSH Why the predictions of a crib-death for the Web when its vital signs are strong? By SCOTT ROSENBERG
The '90s high-tech market rides a boom-bust rollercoaster. First with CD-ROMs and then with interactive television, we have learned to recognize the arc -- from media infatuation through marketplace speculation to mockery and meltdown. These cycles taught us that every hyping carries an equal and opposite trashing. That the same pundits who boost a new technology on the way up will kick it on its way down. And that reality is whatever's left after all the columnists' opinions have cancelled one another out and all the get-rich-quick investors have sold out and gone home. Then the World Wide Web came along, fueled by a particularly heady brew of futuristic hucksterism. The naive quickly bought into the hilarious notion of "the information superhighway" (a label so meaningless it was easily ripped off the never-marketed "set-top box" of interactive TV and plastered onto the Internet). But experienced observers, conditioned by their previous stomach-churning rides, jerked their knees skeptically: The Web was too slow and too geeky; it could never become a mass medium. Astonishingly, at least some of the hype, this time around, came true. The Web was an open platform, a magnet for creativity, an engine of change. It caused old institutions like Microsoft to tremble and new businesses to materialize out of thin air. Still in its infancy, it grew with spectacular speed. But now, something in the ineffable, illogical dynamic of the media and the markets seems to be changing. The rollercoaster pauses before a plunge; the prospect of the death of the Web comes into view. Over on the Well, the hard-core media mavens are asking questions like "Is the Web dying?" and "The coming Web shakeout -- is it coming at all?" On C|Net, a cover story titled "Net Apocalypse" outlines four Net-doom scenarios -- of traffic overload, address shortages, cyberterrorist attacks or a "millennium bug" crippling computers on the eve of the year 2000. The next couple of months are sure to bring a torrent of "Death of the Web" headlines, so here at Salon we thought we'd beat the crowd. Actually, Wired magazine was first out of the gate, with Chip Bayers' April '96 "The Great Web Wipeout" -- a mock Time cover story dated Jan., 1997, which reported widespread Net gridlock and the closing of most commercial Web sites. But that satire seems less funny and more wan after the collapse last week of Wired's own initial public stock offering. Before you take any Web obituary seriously, you need to ask whose Web is being memorialized: The investor's bonanza? the direct-marketer's paradise? the libertarian's "friction-free marketplace"? or the populist's hoedown? The Web is too many things to too many people to pass away gently; it will have to die an awful lot of deaths before it stops twitching and clicking. If coverage of the Web tends to extremes of hype and gloom, the best we can do is inoculate ourselves with frequent doses of perspective. What we need is an interpreter, a kind of Java applet of the mind, to monitor the torrent of headlines and parse them for meaning, context and relevance -- so that the next time some publication screams, "The Web is dead!" we can make sense of the claim.
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