The ins and outs of Internet

[Tom Worthington]

newsgroups: canb.general,aus.org.acs

Crispin Hull <crispin@ozemail.com.au> writes in "The Ins and Outs of Internet" 
in the Canberra Times newspaper, page C3, Saturday 11 March 1995:

>The Information Highway is a long way off for most Australians...

I enjoyed the article and it raises some important points:

* COST: You suggest that information in printed newspapers is cheaper than via 
the Internet ($4 v $500 for Saturday's newspapers). However I only read 
about one page total of Saturday's newspapers (out of about 500 pages). This 
would only cost me about $1 for the Internet equivalent, at the rate quoted 
in the article. This makes the Internet cheaper than the newspapers. Also 
there wouldn't be all that old newspaper to get rid of (I use mine for 
garden mulch, but the roses can only take so much).

* DESCRIPTION OF THE INTERNET: I liked the analogy of the Internet being a set 
of filing cabinets linked together.

* INTERNET CONTAINS JUNK: You make the point that the Internet contains 
material which is self published and so contains no stamp of approval. 
Sorry, but hat's what you get in a democracy: with freedom of speech the 
citizens must decide for themselves what to believe.

For those who want others to censor their information, there are various 
services on the Internet for filtering information. Currently these 
mechanisms (such as moderated newsgroups) are mostly voluntary, but I have 
no doubt more will appear as commercial services.

Unlike paper newspaper publishing, setting up an information service on the 
Internet is relatively cheap and easy. So we might see an increase in 
diversity in the media.

* INTERNET HARD TO NAVIGATE: As you suggest, the Internet is difficult to 
navigate. This partly because the tools to do this are still being developed 
and partly because there is so much information. You gave the example of the 
topic "arsenic contamination and Nepal" and said it would be difficult to 
find out everything about this on the Internet. So I checked and I couldn't 
find any entry for it. But I did find lots about arsenic contamination in 
other places and several UN/World Bank reports on environmental issues in 
Nepal. Don't know where else I could have found this information on a Sunday 
night.

* DEPENDS ON TWISTED COPPER WIRE: As you point out the connections to the 
Internet for most people is by ordinary phone lines, which have limited 
capacity. However it is remarkable how much an ordinary phone line can carry 
(e-mail and the Web are about ten times as efficient as using the same lines 
for facsimile and one thousand time more efficient than the spoken word).

The Web encourages pictures and sound. If you have an ordinary phone line then 
you can appreciate how much bandwidth these take. There are ways to squeeze 
a useful service out of a normal phone line. For tips on more efficient 
documents see: http://acslink.net.au/~tomw/atmhow.html

* COEXISTENCE: I agree that old and new technologies can coexist. One example 
is that you can easily (and cheaply) send faxes from the Internet. There are 
some things we can do to make coexistence work better in Australia. One 
would be to have gateways between the Web and older technology, such as 
e-mail.

* AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS AND BUSINESS FURTHER BEHIND: I don't agree, as you 
appear to suggest, that Australia's use of Internet is inferior to the USA. 
As an example is the "whole-of-Government" home page at the National Library 
of Australia is being built to provide an index to local, state and 
Commonwealth agencies. This doesn't have gimmicks, like the US White-house 
(with photos of the President's cat), but it is a practical and useful 
service.

If you would like to know more about where the InfoBahn, the Internet and 
multimedia are going, (particularly for Government use), then come to the 
ACS's conference on 13 May. For details: 
http://acslink.net.au/~tomw/conf95br.html


Tom Worthington		Ph:  +61 6 2474830
Director of the Community Affairs Board		Fax:   +61 6 2496419
Australian Computer Society Inc.
G.P.O. Box 446, Canberra A.C.T. 2601, Australia
E-mail: tomw@acslink.net.au	Home page: http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw/