Mark Cuban's rant on Friday, The Internet is Dead and Boring, raises a point, but maybe not the one intended. I don't follow his discussion of throughput, though most people's Internet is probably not much faster now than when they first installed broadband. He seems to say that throughput is limiting the creative delivery of content. I think that's a bizarre argument for someone with such an entrepreneurial background.
We need only look to the invention of the telephone to witness another technology whose novelty was projected to wear thin. As the lady says, "I don't think much of it. No one will ever use it." Had my eldest relatives been able to use the Internet in the early days, I'm sure their reaction would not differ.
But the telephone was an eventual success. It was extended with wireless handsets, answering machines, voicemail, cellular and car phones, and often overlooked technologies like Teletype.
The entire time the underlying system didn't change much. At least not to the end user. But layers upon layers of new inventions were thrown at it. Some advanced the system and others, like telemarketing calls, arguably diminished it. These applications made the difference. The telephone as a medium was always boring.
Now we have the Internet, whose scope of possibilities stretches unimaginably far. And much of what is done online doesn't work. These are the telemarketing problems of our time. Often they result from broken analogies. The entire application of email, for example, is proving to fall apart as adoption rates hit the limit. It isn't just broken, it's failing the productivity challenges it intended to correct.
Email was among the first applications of the Internet. It requires minimal bandwidth, extremely simple software, and a low technical competency. When the first users of Pine zipped messages across college campuses in the 1980s, the underlying technology was just as boring as it is today.
Perhaps there are exciting innovations to be had on a gigabit or faster network. But I'll still get more email than I can comprehend.
I really like the graphical display of the "interconnected" telephone system in the video. In about a decade you see the rise of long distance and how it spreads. This reminds me of various graphics you see today regarding Internet connectivity, application usage, "reach", et cetera.