In the five or so years the Web has been a ubiquitous presence in many of our lives, its ratio of usefulness to novelty has teetered significantly to the side of usefulness. No longer are we titillated by just being online and being able to browse low-quality JPEGs of our favorite celebrities. These days we use the Web to keep abreast of breaking news, to book plane tickets, to monitor the weather, to order pet food, to hear new music, to buy books. Given the degree to which the Web has revolutionized how we live our lives in the past five years, how much is it likely to change us in the next five?
Last week the New York Times reported that Stephen King’s latest novella, a 66-page trifle called "Riding the Bullet," is being distributed exclusively over the Internet, in digital form. Various high-tech companies, Microsoft among them, have been touting a next-generation phenomena called the electronic book for the better part of a year. The way it works is this: you download a book from the Internet and read it either on your computer screen or on one of a whole breed of new handheld devices. These early devices are pretty clunky, as Publish magazine reported last year, and a standard electronic format for the books has yet to be agreed upon. Never the less, with the release of the apparent crowd-pleaser "Riding the Bullet," it appears that the digital age is storming ahead and we can’t avoid a future in which we’ll be downloading Shakespeare to read on our handheld devices at the beach.
The Web is threatening to change more than just the way we buy and read books. As it forges ahead in its mission to make our lives more digital than analog, the Web is also on its way to change the way we see movies. Sites such as atomfilms.com are now releasing films, in digital and streaming video format, without the traditional hassle of finding a distributor among the Hollywood suits. Independent filmmakers, such as New Yorker Maya Churi who released her film Letters From Homeroom on the Web, are looking to the Internet for the audience exposure they would be hard pressed to cull from the film festival circuit. Whether the increasing availability of film on the Internet means we viewers will have to wade through more crap, or will have easier access to non-studio produced gems, is unclear. What is clear is that sooner or later the Web will change the way we watch movies.
Yet the Internet has perhaps had the greatest effect so far on the music industry. Since audio files can squeeze through smaller pipes than their bulkier video cousins, Netizens have been downloading music tracks, in the popular MP3 format, for some time now. There are even a range of portable playback devices available for mobile Web users who want to download music and take it with them. Now the use of the Web for exchanging and procuring music files is mushrooming even more, thanks to Napster, a free software product developed by a 19-year-old college dropout. Napster lets anyone on the Internet exchange MP3 files with anyone else online and using the software. Napster has been so successful it is shaking the traditional recording industry to its bones, and by all accounts will quickly change the way we get our music, not to mention the price we pay for it.
Will the Web spell doom for the CD, the book, and the movie theater? Perhaps it will, to varying degrees. And if it does, what will happen to the warehouses of movies on actual film, the libraries of paper books, and the retail outlets crowded with compact discs?
Does anyone remember the 5 1/2-inch floppy disk? Or even the 3 1/2-inch disc for that matter, also slowly phasing out of the modern computer. I have a box in my parents’ attic of 5 1/2-inch disks, packed with stories I wrote in college, stories I can’t read anymore because they are stored on a medium that’s gone the way of the dodo. With the quickening of technology, I worry that the same fate may befall these new types of media, and even faster. In ten years, will my folder full of MP3 files be totally useless? Will my QuickTime videos be gathering cyber-dust? Will I be able to read the latest e-books on my antiquated reading device?
I think the Web is great – I can do more from the comfort of my own home than I ever could before. I have access to more information than ever and I always get excited when I see this medium expanded to do something new and different, something I might not have thought possible. Even so, I’ll keep my books on good old paper, and know I’ll be able to read them forever, regardless of the direction the Web may take me. Technology may be cool, but it’s also a little scary.
Andrea Dudrow is a writer living in sunny San Francisco. She has been covering the Web and Web design for the past four years and has contributed to Macworld, MacWEEK, eMediaweekly, Adobe.com, Adobe magazine, Publish, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She also writes about arts and culture, and spends a great deal of time fantasizing about the broadband future.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on March 28, 2000
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