I was visiting my friends Helen and John one night when Helen started telling me how
excited about the World Wide Web John had become. He said, "Ask me anything at all,
and I can find the answer for you." I asked what the new U.S. postal rate for
international air mail was, knowing it had recently gone up from $.50. He delighted
over finding a Web page for the Postal Service, and quickly found the rate: $.50.
Wrong.
Later John showed me a spiffy magazine called NewMedia, and in it an article by
longtime hypertext proponent Ted Nelson. Nelson expressed his joy that, with HTML
and the Web, hypertext's time has finally come; we can now leave the insanity of
"paper simulation" behind and write in a way that lets information take on its truer,
interconnected form.
I found the article, and John's enthusiasm over the Web, a bit disconcerting. The Web
is indeed a boon to humankind, but I don't see it entirely replacing what came before.
The world's love affair with the Web reminds me of the early days of TV (so I'm told),
when many people were sure that radio was dead. Out with the old, in with the new. But
in fact the old still had its place in the world. The virtues of the Web don't mean we no
longer need to get information from flesh and blood people sometimes, or from books
and other media that we can hold in our hands. This may seem obvious, but from the
near hysteria surrounding the Web these days, I'm not sure it is.
A few days after my visit with Helen and John, with John still smarting from his failed
demonstration of the wonderfulness of the Web, Helen called and mentioned that she
needed the lyrics to "House of the Rising Sun." I could hear John in the background,
tapping away as he searched for them online. I said I'd use old technology and call back
with them soon. The race was on.
After looking through my looseleaf binders full of song lyrics and a couple of big
songbooks, I dug through my tapes and found an ancient recording of Woody Guthrie
singing the song. After lots of rewinding and transcribing, I had more verses than
Helen ever dreamed existed. When I triumphantly called back, John (several levels
down in the Library of Congress) was mortified.
While old technology will typically not beat Web browsers in the search for nuggets of
information, it will not die, and it deserves proper respect. There are some things
we'll learn only through person-to-person contact. And there are emotions we'll
experience only from hearing or reading good old-fashioned sequential deliveries. The
World Wide Web is a valuable resource, but it is not, after all, the world.
Caroline Rose Editor
CAROLINE ROSE (AppleLink CROSE) enjoys editing develop so much that she fears she
may for get to retire someday. She started out in technical writing and editing eons ago,
eventually moving on to programming and even management before returning to her
original calling. What seems to be calling her now is the sea: Her last vacation took
her up to Puget Sound (stalking wild elk on the Olympic Peninsula on the way), and
her next will be in a sailboat in the Bahamas. She may even have the opportunity to
cruise the Pacific in a few years but she's not sure she' ll be ready to leave develop,
her cat, or terra firma. *