22 years after, ‘Newsweek’ takes red pen to flawed Internet column

It’s been 22 years since Newsweek magazine published one of the most astonishingly off-target commentaries about the Internet and the early Web.

The commentary was so strikingly wrong-headed that it has become a classic of sorts, one that is often rediscovered online, allowing it to gain fresh traction and circulation on social media platforms such as Twitter.

It was published in the Newsweek issue dated February 27, 1995, and carried the headline:

“The Internet? Bah!”

The commentary’s author, an astrophysicist and computer maven named Clifford Stoll, confidently presented a variety of predictions about the then-unfolding digital landscape. Most of them proved memorably wrong.

Stoll (TED.com)

“Uh, sure,” Stoll wrote of forecasts “that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet.”

He wrote dismissively about cyberbusiness, stating: “We’re promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts.”

He declared that “Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”

As it has on occasion in the years since 1995, Newsweek revisited the commentary the other day, and took a red pen to Stoll’s predictions.

It made for an amusing, if snarky, look back (see image, nearby).

To Stoll’s assertion that “you can’t tote that laptop to the beach,” Newsweek answered in red capital letters, “WRONG.”

To Stoll’s scoffing about “a future of telecommuting workers,” Newsweek declared, “This fully happened.”

“With the exception of a couple [of] fair points and insights about the internet’s lack of human contact (true) and how it begets social isolation (semi-true), the article,” Newsweek said, “is very, very, very wrong.”

Stoll’s commentary appeared in Newsweek a few weeks before publication of his book, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, which offered even more assured predictions that likewise proved stunningly off-base. Here are some of them, which I quoted in my book, 1995: The Year the Future Began: