Seen this yet?

[Martianinvader]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
It's getting passed around. A rant about how useless the Internet is and how it'll never amount to anything. Originally published in Newsweek: February 1995.

Even though it's amusing in many places, he still has some good points that maybe we should have listened to. At least THIS guy thinks so:
http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/a-dec...struction.html

[mobo85]

This is an interesting article, especially seeing how some things have come true or changed 14 years down the line: there are now sites such as Wikipedia that work as centralized information portals (though even they have their occasional flaws), buying books online has become very popular (both in actual book form and Kindle and such), and shopping online has become very popular. I don't know if my trips to New York City would be as fun or productive if I didn't have my iPhone with me to check movie times, locations of things, or figure out just where the heck I am right now. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: the Internet is still full of loud voices, most of them with nothing to say; the Internet is still not as good a source of research as the written word (which makes me wonder what will happen to the few bits of good information that can only be found online in the future), and I still prefer going outside and doing real things than their virtual counterparts.

The Internet was indeed a revolutionary tool, but it certainly didn't do everything those early hopefuls claimed it would eventually do- but then again, name me any new advance or form of technology that ever did do everything people would think it would eventually do. For what the Internet has done compared to what it hasn't, society as a whole is better off and pretty damn lucky.