by Gary Welz, Tangent Design
The Internet Grows Up as a Media Business
by Gary Welz, Tangent Design
If the recent highly publicized flap about 8 million AOL users and the frustration they endured with busy signals when they tried to get online tells us anything, it tells us that the Internet has become an essential medium of communication for millions of people. It is a sign of our medium in its adolescence, stretching to its newly reached height and stumbling over its own feet.Rob Glaser, founder of Progressive Networks, recently said that the AOL situation and the amount of press coverage it got was "both sobering and enlightening. Sobering because it shows how far we have to go, enlightening because it shows how deeply we've permeated into the psyche of the country and the blood stream of commerce, community, and culture."
The ascension of the Internet as a mass medium has happened much faster than anyone could have imagined. I first saw the Web at the University Computer Center of the City University of New York in the fall of 1994. At that time there were only 700 Web sites on the planet, and not one in New York City. I don't have to tell you what's happened since. You can't watch a television commercial or read a newspaper without seeing URLs all over the place. The astonishing thing is that now everyone takes for granted that the expression http://www.somewhere.com has meaning to nearly the entire population.
But what will it take for the Internet to really mature as a mass medium. Glaser thinks that the key is reliability. He reminded me that newspapers and telephones have achieved such a high degree of reliability that we are surprised and annoyed when the morning paper doesn't arrive on our doorstep or the call we placed can't be connected. The same can be said for radio and TV. Can you remember the last time a television network went down due to "technical difficulties"? I seem to remember that used to happen sometimes when I was a kid, but how about in the past 10 years? The Net is still far from that state, and that's its greatest weakness.
The infrastucture is straining in other ways, too. Not just at the logon stage, but all through the Net, whether you're trying to view streaming video or listen to streaming audio that comes in sounding choppy and broken up. If you trade stocks online you're surely familiar with the excruciating pain of being unable to buy or sell a stock because of access problems.
We've been promised cable modems, and some of us already have 56K modems or ISDN lines. We're hungering for more, and we tolerate the inefficiencies. Business people wouldn't have believed such an unreliable and technically unsophisticated medium could really attract a mass audience. Then again, they would have said the same thing about television when it was a few hours a day of black and white programming on a 9" screen.
What is so compelling about this medium that causes it to be so popular in spite of itself?
Is it variety? The ability to go to Yahoo and find more than you could possibly want to know about anything whatsoever? That's part of it.
Is it big-time media? The Time-Warners, Disneys, CNNs and MSNBCs would hope so.
Is it the ability to spend money? Online shopping, stock trading, and soon gambling? Electronic commerce may be the most developed aspect of the Net.
Is it community? The ability to meet and exchange information with other individuals--people just like yourself, not publishers or writers, just folks, whether they're in Parent Soup or Silicon Investor.
It's an enigma in many ways. And yet this magical beast is growing and consuming more and more of our time and lives. And we love it.
