The WorldWideWeb, 10 years later. They said that the Web was going to deeply change our lives. Has it? Let's see.
This is what the Web has changed:
- We never got to read peoples diaries. Now there are blogs all over the place on Internet! Every guy and his uncle tell his life stories and we learn a lot of weird stuff. That is when we have to patience to read a complete day!
- In the old days we'd go to the music store to buy a record or a CD. Now we go and download MP3s. Artists are getting poorer. Pretty soon you'd find Mick Jagger and his guitar street-singing and passing the hat; Stevie Wonder going bankrupt...
- Actually, Record Companies and Distribution houses are worried about getting poorer. Some musicians out there are able to take the new model of music distribution in their stride, and make money from merchandise, concerts, etc. (And arguably, that is how most of the musicians make their money anyway.)
- Popular musicians tend to make most of their money from concert appearances, not media sells.
- Writing an encyclopedia could cost millions of dollars. You needed contributions by dozens of scholars. Nowadays you start a wiki, you pay a few hundred dollars a month and you have thousand of free contributors. Wikipedia.org.
- If you want authoritative informationn, however...
- Has made offshoring much easier, perhaps ruining some of our careers or salaries.
- They said with the Web the business structure was going to be revolutionized by cutting the intermediates. Well we still have a lot of intermediates in the chain! And the big corporations are horning in whereever they can.
Several inaccurate points removed.
Comments
How about research, how often do you ever go to a library anymore? How about communication, how much better is that phone bill now? How about working from home, how about shopping online, how about a ton of other stuff that has drastically changed many of our lives, especially those of use who work in the industry?
These days I spend all my time googling and reading research papers on the web and wasting time on this wiki. What a change! 10 years ago I spent all my time chatting with people in social MUDs and in Usenet newsgroups and downloading research pages via ftp. ;-)
I.e. the web has changed the world (look at online shopping and B2B, for starters), but to me the web was not as sharp a transition as was the introduction of Usenet mail and newsgroups and the policy change that allowed random sites onto the Internet. The thing is, those things didn't effect the man on the street, only (primarily) engineers. The web has brought all that to the man on the street.
CategoryInteraction
Social Effects Of The Web