`I live on the Net," declares Esther Dyson, thinker, author, "the most powerful women in the Neterati" according to the New York Times. Opining that the Internet will change all human institutions, but not human nature, Ms Dyson says. "Its impact will change all our lives. It will suck power away from central governments, mass media, and big business."
Whew. A tall order. And difficult to dispute. There are over 200 million people using the Internet in the world. Some 80 million of them are in America. And everyone is using the Net to do something different.
Humans have spent an estimated $184 billion dollars over the last three years buying books and videos and airline tickets and facial moisturiser. They are investing what money they have left with online brokerages. They are listening to the BBC. They are downloading video footage from RTE News, they are reading The Irish Times.
In California, a move is underway to allow voters to cast their votes with the click of a mouse. They are educating themselves about a variety of topics both serious and inane. Some of them are wasting time. And some of them are even having sex on the Net.
After all, the Net is about democracy. Danni Ashe, a Florida stripper once arrested onstage in Florida in 1995, sat down afterwards and read MIT guru Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital along with the HTML Manual of Style, according to Newsweek. She then launched Danni's Hard Drive, a porn site where subscribers can view nude photos and sexual videos, as well as chat with other members. Ms Ashe tells the magazine the site has 25,000 paying members. And she is no longer plying her wares in a smoky club.
Then there is e-mail. There are 400 million e-mail boxes on the Internet, with 57 million new addresses appearing in the first three months of 1999. Think of this: it took 40 years for the telephone to reach its first 10 million users; it took e-mail to reach that many users in less than a year.
AT&T takes e-mail so seriously that it has buried 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel, aimed at powering two diesel engines at a secret location in Illinois, all ready to go if electric power should fail on January 1st. The world may stop, but e-mail will go on.
Now of course the emphasis is on faster, faster. Futurist Alvin Toffler once wrote that the new competition in the world would not take place between the East and the West or the north and the south - but between the fast and the slow. Or, as its been called, the "quick and the dead".
In 1997, some 300,000 people used high speed access such as cable modem, ISDN or DSL to get online, while the rest used modems connected to standard telephone lines. Today that figure is up to 2.4 million users, and the experts tell us that high speed modem access is the next "big thing" worldwide. Connection speeds are up to 100 times faster than conventional 56K lines. Pictures come whizzing through faster, messages fly. Competition to provide high speed Internet access is already feverish in much of the US.
There is truth in all this techno-prediction, and the Net has already changed many of our lives. The hardware is there. But it also seems like few prognosticators are looking at the bottleneck, the flaw in the slaw, the dullest crayon in the box.
Let me introduce you to Ron, - a symbol of his time.
Perhaps I should back up. Here in Los Angeles, I use a cable modem for high speed access, and boy, is it great. A company called MediaOne came to my house, gave me a little metal box that connects to my MacIntosh G3, and now my cable television service and my Internet service come into my house on the same wire. Everything is turned on all the time. I couldn't be happier.
But I spend a good deal of time in New York City, and the experience with high speed access in Los Angeles made me impatient with a conventional 56K connection. And, unbelievably, Time Warner has yet to install cable modem lines in the area of Manhattan where I live. So for now, I must turn to Bell Atlantic, the telephone company that offers DSL (digital subscriber line) high speed access. Bell Atlantic is aggressively advertising the service, touting their futuristic expertise. I expected to do what I had done in Los Angeles; call up the company, spend five minutes on the telephone, greet the installer the following day, and be high speed surfing within hours.
That is where Ron comes in. He was the Bell Atlantic Internet technical service representative who would take my order over the telephone, determine my computer specifications.
I will not torture you with the contents of our 70 minute conversation, but I will highlight a few of the exchanges. When giving Ron the address for installation;
Ron: "I can't use that address."
Me: "Huh? What? It's an apartment building in Manhattan. Why not?
Ron: "Because it's too many words to fit on the line."
Me: "Oh - then abbreviate `street'."
Ron: "What?"
Me: "Just type `St', Ron. Do it. Trust me."
Ron: "Okay."
When it came time to determine the technical specifications of my computer;
Ron: "Is it Windows-compatible?"
Me: "No. It's a Mac."
Ron: "Er, does it have a . . . a . . . processor?"
Me: "What?"
Ron: "You know . . . does it have a processor?"
Me: "Every computer has a processor."
Ron: "Oh. I don't know much about computers. Like a system?"
Me: "An operating system? Yes, it's called Mac OS8."
Ron: "Oh, okay. Good."
You can see why this exchange was anything but accelerated. And that is the problem with all the predictions of speed. In the midst of these exchanges are human beings, with all their variables in training and intelligence.
Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for the New Yorker magazine and author of a forthcoming but already hailed book about society called The Tipping Point, maintains that the human element is much overlooked in the new world of e-commerce.
In using the example of Land's End, a major catalogue clothes retailer in the US, Mr Gladwell notes that the company has undergone three major changes over the last few decades. The first was the introduction of a free national telephone number in 1978; the second was express parcel shipping in 1994; the third was the introduction of a web site in 1995.
The first two innovations, Mr Gladwell writes in the New Yorker, cut the transaction time - the time between the moment of ordering and the time goods are received - from three weeks to four days. The third innovations has not affected transaction time at all. It is still four days.
Responding to Bill Gates's assertion that instant communication will shatter the old ways of doing business, Mr Gladwell writes, "Yet why is the critical factor, how quickly I communicate some decision or message to you - as opposed to how long it takes me to make that decision, or how long it takes you to act on it?"
Esther Dyson may live on the Net, may live in the brave new high speed world . . . but she doesn't live in on older building in New York City. My Bell Atlantic DSL technician is scheduled to appear soon.
Wish me luck.
Elaine Lafferty may be contacted, with a little help from Ron, at elainelafferty@ireland.com