If talk is cheap, than e-mail is worth next to nothing, or so I've noticed lately. Maybe words expressed via e-mail seem cheap because they are cheap. They're easily modified and changed. They can even be generated by computers themselves.
I remember a story about an automatic response generator for an e-mail to Santa Claus service. Apparently, one grinch received some e-mail from Santa and replied. Santa, being away feeding the reindeer had an e-mail robot set up to respond with a cute randomized message. The grinch thought a person (or elf) was on the other end and became increasingly annoyed at the very prompt, obnoxiously cute responses. Needless to say, Santa knew she was naughty, not nice that year.
The breakthrough of the web was that it made a global communication network easy to use, what we call user-friendly. The problem is that since that time, the web has become less people-friendly.
When I started CRAYON, my personalized newspaper service on Bucknell's web server, I asked people to send e-mail regarding CRAYON to my personal e-mail address, [email protected]. I used to get lots of messages from people thanking me for the service or just saying "hi." Now, CRAYON has been "commercialized" and moved away from Bucknell. People send mail about the service to a less personal address, [email protected] and I get significantly fewer nice messages. I guess sending e-mail to a crayon just isn't that stimulating.
But receiving less personal e-mail is not the greatest of problems on the expanding net. For a while, the media coverage of the net was mostly positive, showing this new techno-culture medium. Now, like most other things, the negative is the concentration, whether it be pornography or hate mail.
The Internet has become a megalopolis. When you bring 25 million people together in one place, there will be some disagreements and there will be crime. Wireheads are crazy about finding security bugs in browsers and worrying about their credit card number being stolen. They tend to forget that it's a lot easier to pick up receipts off the ground at a gas station than sniff a network for credit card numbers.
Fortunately, in the virtual community, it's a lot harder to do really bad things. It's really hard to kill someone via e-mail (sorry, software viruses can't infect people) and the worst someone can do is threaten you.
The most common annoyance is spamming: the practice of sending out messages to broad and disinterested audiences. Don't ask me about the relation to everyone's favorite ham-like food product.
Who knew that by building a global network of communication (that's the Internet, folks) that we would only proliferate the distribution of get-rich-quick schemes and this-joke-is-somewhat-funny-so-i'll-send-it-to-everyone-I-know-and-they'll-send-it-to-everyone-they-know e-mail messages.
It's what some Wireheads would call the signal-to-noise ratio; it's the amount of junk that gets in the way of the good stuff.
But Wireheads are not dumb. They found a way to weed through the garbage-they built fancy-schmancy search pages. So instead of searching through web pages, you search through results of searches.
One site took the search process one step further last week. Search.com, get this, is a page where you search for places to search. What's worse is that I find this site very useful.
The next step tool for finding information will be what computer scientists call agents: computer programs that go out and look for information for you. One service, called Firefly makes this technology available on the web.
Although the Internet is a network of computers, not people, we have to remember it's for the people, not the computers.