THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601130025
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
In an attempt to understand the consuming public, marketeers cut them into all sorts of fine conceptual slices. One category that interests them is early adopters. These are the guys who have got to be the first to own a car phone or the person who rushes out to dye his hair purple and have parts of his body pierced. I have nothing in common with either of them.
I resist doing anything new as long as feasible. Part of this is simple cheapness. Why buy a new garage door opener with bells and whistles when the old one will do as well. In fact, why buy a garage door opener at all. In fact, I haven't even got a garage.
I justify my reluctance to be an early adopter by quoting Thoreau who said to beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes. That ought to go double for new technology. Needless to say I have been slow to join the stampede to surf the net or browse the web.
In fact, I've mocked the Internet as this season's CB radio, a passing fad. When exactly have you last heard anybody say: breaker, breaker, good buddy? I admit technophobia plays a part in my skepticism. I've had trouble mastering machines as simple as the door knob or the faucet. I made the transition directly from quill pen to computer because I never figured out the typewriter.
Naturally enough, the appeal of this Internet E-mail/chatroom stuff has baffled me. Why would anyone (other than a playwright) want to type conversations when you can have them on the phone - or in person.
But I have now been on the net, and I am at least a partial convert. Some of what it has to offer is clearly more than a fad. It's genuinely new. Just to mention the Gs I bumped into on my first foray into cyberspace: I found a site devoted to George and Ira Gershwin, another concerning Greek mythology, a third giving weather reports for Athens, Greece, and classified ads for real estate in Gascony. Got any interest in a two-bedroom farmhouse with views of the Pyrenees at a reasonable price? Way cool, is about all I can say to a mere phone call that brings you all that.
On the other hand, my experience cruising the information superhighway was not without potholes. In fact, the highway at times resembles a cow path. The on ramps can be annoying. The speeds are not always those of an autobahn. Instead of browsing, there's a lot of infuriating clicking and pointing and ball rolling and scrolling up and down and waiting to hop from here to there. Quite often one is brought to a screeching halt by an unmade connection.
I also cling to the conviction that this thing won't become a mass phenomenon until getting in motion is less pricey. Right now, the gear needed would constitute for most people their third biggest expense after a house and car - fourth biggest if their kid has braces. Houses, cars and braces last a lot longer. Computers seem to become obsolete at the speed of light.
Until the price is driven down to rival a new TV or stereo, an awful lot of households will find the info superhighway prohibitively expensive. Playing the game has also got to get a lot easier. There's still entirely too much hppt//www//gobbledy.gook involved.
I regard the TV remote control as the single greatest invention of the 20th century. When the Internet equivalent is perfected, sign me up. In the meantime, I have met the future and it doesn't work well enough - yet.
Real Internauts are repulsed by this kind of talk. One took me to task this week for my negative attitude. He said I talked just the way people without vision did when the Stanley Steamer came along, when the phone was a luxury item, when the TV was new.
He's exactly right, and that's my point. Who wanted a car when they ran on steam? Too much trouble. Who wanted a phone when there was nobody else to talk to? I wouldn't have been in the market for a TV when it had a 5-inch screen you had to watch through a 15-inch magnifying glass and the only program was a test pattern. Similarly, until they get a few more bugs out of the net, I'm not likely to become a regular.
It appears to me a lot of the web's homepages are like billboards touting Arcadian homesites. When you look behind the sign, nothing has actually been built yet. Someday that muddy field will be Levittown, but we aren't quite there yet. Still, since there's no going back, we'd probably all better get ready to go forward. It could be a heck of a ride. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page.
by CNB