[8814] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
VERY serious $ Business now done on Internet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Dec 5 19:56:18 1993
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1993 19:55:22 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: cook@path.net
Cc: cman@caffeine.io.com, farber@central.cis.upenn.edu, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Gordon Cook's message of Sun, 5 Dec 1993 16:15:01 GMT <9312051615.aa00193@pandora.sf.ca.us>
Hey, when Newsweek was doing their article they sent one of their
reporters over here to chit-chat with me. She was a very nice and
bright young person but obviously was on staff, did all kinds of
articles on all kinds of topics for a living, and hadn't barely a clue
what all this was about (except inasmuch as she'd probably gotten a
bunch of recent magazine and newspaper articles out of their morgue
and read them over.)
That's the media biz. Whenever you know something about a topic, even
just a big car wreck, you almost always find the reporting lacking in
some respects that appear very important to those few who know. About
the best reporters can be is fast studies. It's very difficult to work
with specialized free-lancers (when you can even find one) on every
topic that gets copy space.
And let's face it, from the perspective of these folks (at Time or
whatever) the NII looks a bit less important than, say, the latest
Supreme Court decision (which one might endeavor to get right, in
summary) and probably up there with the general interest trendy stuff
that might be important some day (virtual reality etc.) or the latest
Shuttle mission but most likely few of their readers are going to read
something not quite accurate in their article and rush right out and
kill themselves.
No one media source is critical or reliable, particularly if the worst
one can say about it is that it had the right basic idea but made a
few serious boffos.
Let's put it this way: If the only place the public develops its
attitude about the NII is from that one Time article then we're kinda
dead in the water anyhow.
But it's still worthwhile trying to educate the media of course, just
not worthwhile getting too upset (in the early stages of a technology)
when they get it wrong.
Heck, if I had a nickel for every time I gasped in disbelief at what
they said about PCs and computing in general way back when...and even
today.
-Barry Shein
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