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| Talk,
Graham Bower,
15 January 1999 | |
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I remember the first time I heard about the Internet. I guess it was back in '94, when Cyberia, London's first Internet cafe opened up near Goodge Street off Tottenham Court Road. I used to go in there to read about upcoming Star Trek episodes (some things don't change!) on an old 486 with a Mosaic browser. The staff there were very friendly, and explained what the internet was, describing how TCP/IP worked, and demonstsrating various internet services, like E-mail, the World Wide Web, FTP Servers, and Internet Relay Chat. It was all very geeky, and all very cool. Everything was simple (provided you found computers simple) there were no big companies, no "dotcoms," hot IPOs, and definitely no tired old companies jumping on the the internet band-wagon to give their boring products a superficial dotcom gloss.
Things have come a long way over the past five years. Now millions of people are on the internet. They're "surfing," apparently. Now I'm not one to point the finger and say "Newbie" and I have no problem with millions of new users discovering the benefits that the internet has to offer. What bugs me however, is the misconceptions that these users sometimes bring with them, and insist on perpetuating. And the biggest sin of them all is the use of the word "Internet," to mean World Wide Web. Everyone seems to do it these days - heck even AOL does it in their advertising - "check your E-mail and browse in the internet".
So where does this come from? How has the Web suddenly become the Internet for these people? Well in order to understand this misconception, we need to attempt to get into the mindsets of the advertising "experts' who write these ads for AOL. They're hip & groovy media types, working in some funky Soho or Fitzrovia office, who probably resent working on such a "techie" account and would rather be doing something more glamorous. They've never really used the Internet, with the exception of forwarding the Hamster Dance address to a friend now and then. (One such advertising expert recently explained to one of my colleagues that ADSL stands for "Advanced Digital Satellite Link.") They don’t understand that E-mail and Web are network services, and that there are many different ways in which the internet can be used, because they’ve never used the Internet for anything other than surfing, and they’ve got in interest in getting their facts straight.
There, I’ve got that off my chest. But that’s not my problem. You see, I can’t take satisfaction in the fact that I’m right and they’re wrong, because these days, Internet illiterates are in the majority, and they’re not going to go away. I might not like the fact that they’re mixing everything up, but that’s not going to stop them from doing it. A very senior marketing bod explained to me a couple of weeks ago that no one says "Web" any more. ‘It’s an out of date expression, like "Cyberspace." Everyone just says "Internet" these days.’ The frustrating thing is that whilst we may know this to be technically inaccurate, she was probably right.
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