I'm over the Internet

For pure shock value (and readership), it’s always good to title one’s blog entry with hyperbole. Yup, that's today. Fact is, I’ll be giving up my anytime, anywhere access to information, people, and resources, uh...well, OK, never. But I do have a point to make. 

As with all things like this, it was stimulated by a relatively small event. My wife’s addiction to her iPad, and the Facebook and Pinterest it delivers, is pretty pervasive. (An aside: my culinary experiences are extensive and of high quality, so no complaints here!) She discovered a couple of weeks ago that Safari (the iPad’s browser) was only sporadically allowing her to “like” and “comment” in Facebook, which took almost all the pleasure out of it. Her solution, of course, was to post this problem right back into Facebook, where she got a chorus of other iPad users with exactly the same problem. My observation was that FB’s constant tweaking of its underlying code probably delivered something that got stuck in Safari's craw, causing it to give up, mid-page-load, in disgust. Often, the code behind a lot of interactive Internet sites is extensive enough that it pushes the limits of browsers. And, like a YouTube stuck in “buffer limbo,” the whole experience will just hang mid-“sentence.” and the stuff well below what actually broke the stream will fail to work too.

Of course, lots of people would say, “That’s the price you pay for a very full Internet experience.” To which I say, “Bah!” (Usually, of course, with a sufficiently menacing wave of my cane.) Frankly, I got a full phone conversation experience well before there were cell phones, and the fact that cell phones only work 75% of the time, is a step backwards from the “full phone experience.” (Since we’re just talking about the “phone experience," let’s ignore all the other stuff cells do these days, for now. Hyperbole, remember?) In many technology arenas, we’re regularly trading dependability for capability. That’s happening in Internet browsers too.

 This, of course, is all being driven by the fact that the Internet has become one of the biggest cash cows in our society. Although online holiday sales are not yet surpassing traditional retail in volume, the time is coming. Beyond retail (and, one could argue, even inside, throwing Amazon into the mix), there has been a consistent pattern in many online commercial ventures…

1. Come up with an idea which you think will be attractive to a large number of people.
2. Build the site supporting this idea, and give away access to it for free.
3. If it becomes enormously popular, try to figure out some way of making money from it.

That is exactly what’s happening with social networking online. You could argue that Facebook didn’t start out with a business plan, but now that it has almost a billion users (and, even more important, shareholders to make happy), it’s hell-bent on making one happen. That might very well be what caught my wife and her iPad-using “friends” – the code tweaks were a direct result of trying to increase the targeted ads and other commercial clickables on a user’s home page.

 OK, I will fully admit I was probably wrong about that (my wife’s problems disappeared a few days after an OS upgrade), but I’ve had multiple functionality crashes that I know were from this.

Here’s the deal. If the increase in functionality actually improves our experience online – that is, makes it fuller and more valuable rather than just more profitable – and the tradeoff with dependability isn’t too annoying, I’m good. However, the Internet is still basically a place of links, images, media, and connections. All of these things worked quite fine, thank you very much, more than a decade ago. They still do on many sites. But the popups, embedded ads, redirects, survey prompts, and masses of “like” and “tweet” and “follow” buttons aren’t really improving things. They’re there just to distract, herd...and mostly sell.

It is important for us to remember that an awful lot of what we view as educationally valuable content and capability is actually delivered by us. We are the product, as Facebook observers are wont to state. We should make every effort to find platforms which aren't suffering from someone’s business plan. The Internet started out as a military and university project. Its roots are deep in people supporting each other through connections, and leveraging non-profit and cheap hosting services to do so. (Remember Bit-Net, IRC? They were non-commercial services with no interest in profits.)

I just spent an afternoon training on Windows 8. With it, Apple’s iTunes, the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble Nook Color, it’s clear this will all get worse. Just like streaming video and cable/dish services are doing right now with TV/movie content, there may come a time when you’ll have to decide which Internet (Apple’s, Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or whatever is the next big thing) you want to use – a decision made at the point of hardware purchase. That’s going to be a very tough thing for public and higher education to digest.

But don’t mind me….it’s probably all just hyperbole…