It s amazing how much hype there s been in the last year about the promise of the Internet. You can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without being hit over the head with references to the "Information Highway".
But away from the hype and the "highway" metaphor, the 'net looks more like an aquarium to me. And not a very busy one at that. Besides the large group who use it just for E-mail, the Internet houses four basic categories of "fish": computer industry people, the university and defense crowd, the "techies" and journalists.
Those in the first group the computer folks are in the aquarium because they want to make a buck. They're trying to catch the commercial "wave of the future", but they're not surfers. They're sharks. And in order to make their fortune, they need fish (those E-mail-using innocents!) who'll buy things and get gobbled up. Although these sharks do pay their own way (unlike the next group), they're basically sellers, not buyers.
The second group, the university and defense community, uses the Internet heavily, mainly because they get access for free. Like all free users of anything, they're always looking for more "freebies". They're fish alright . . . but they're bottom feeders, not the sort of meal these sharks have a taste for.
The "techies" are paying users of the Internet. But there are so few of them and they're so quirky that they don't add up to much of a market. They're bottom feeders too, with only slightly more spending money than the Ivory Tower and Pentagon crowd.
Finally, there are the journalists. Although many people think they're the real bottom feeders, they're really not even in the aquarium. They're visitors looking in through the glass from the outside and telling everyone else what they see. Because they aren't fish experts, they can't tell a fish from a shark. But they do see lots of swimming going on, so they keep reporting (and we keep reading) how full of fish the aquarium is.
The truth is, there are almost no fish in the aquarium. The aquarium is getting fuller, largely because every week a new bunch of computer people look in and see a lot more sharks than last time they looked. They figure, "with all those sharks, there must be some fish", so they jump in and become sharks themselves.
Right now the Internet Aquarium is still a wet, murky environment. Navigation is slow and, as with most aquariums, it's sometimes pretty boring (let's be honest). My prediction: the fish will come (soon, I think . . . but as part of the computer industry and thus a potential shark I'm biased). They'll come because, despite all I've said, there's plenty of fish food there and more's on the way. Eventually the marine population will balance out. But in the meantime, a lot of sharks will get pretty thin waiting for the pickings to improve.
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