On a recent visit my parents from The Netherlands complained that Australian free-to-air television did not have any teletext information. I had completely forgotten about this technology, but apparently it is still in use.
The remark brought me back to the late 80s and early 90s when I was working at a horticultural co-operative who developed several videotex applications to inform farmers of product prices and sales revenue. Personal computers were still out of reach for many farmers and we tried to promote videotex terminals or “minitels” as the French called them as a cheap alternative.
I never liked the interface with its limited colours and visible squares. It was always a fight to get the necessary information on a page. I probably wasn’t the only one. We never sold many terminals.
Nevertheless the technology was used widespread in the agricultural industry and from time to time representatives of various organisations would meet on how to improve services. For one of these meetings we invited a speaker to inform us about the developments of the internet. It looked fantastic, but only few present believed it would take off. The amount of households and businesses with a computer was still very low and dial-up the only affordable option to access online information. Many saw opportunities for private use and entertainment, but doubt the net would be secure enough to attract businesses.
We all know the next bit is history.
According to Jaron Lanier, a digital guru and pioneer of virtual reality the fateful and unnerving aspect of information technology is that a particular design will occasionally fill a niche and once implemented turns out to be unalterable. It becomes a permanent fixture from then on even though a better design might just as well have taken its place before the moment of entrenchment.
It looks like we managed to avoid this trap for the videotex technology.
Jaron Lanier is very positive about the introduction of the web. According to him the rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new positive information about human potential. In vast numbers people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful. In Jaron’s opinion the web was functioning rather well without a business plan. However, things have changes with the introduction of Google and the likes and he suggests we are skeptical about some aspects of web 2.0.
In his book “You are not a gadget, a manifesto” he is fighting against what he calls “cybernetic totalism”, the idea that a global brain can be formed by the sum of all human brains connected through the internet and the collective consciousness that might rise from it.
Jaron Lanier is worried that the web designs that are on the verge of being locked in actively demand that people define themselves downward and individuality and humanity will be lost. According to him, the central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care more about the abstraction of the network than the real people who are networked.
Not an easy, but interesting read and possibly a source for another blog.
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