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IP: HEAR HEAR, what I and others have been saying for a while now djf --- Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 19:03:59 -0400
From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com> To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>
Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq By MICHAEL LEWIS The New York Times When Internet stocks began their free fall in March 2000, the Internet was finally put in its proper place. It was nothing more than a fast delivery service for information -- that was what serious people who had either lost a lot of money in the late stages of the Internet boom or, more likely, failed to make money began to say now. The profit-making potential of the Internet had been overrated, and so the social effects of the Internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren't. Speeding up information was not the only thing the Internet had done. The Internet had made it possible for people to thwart all sorts of rules and conventions. It wasn't just the commercial order that was in flux. Many forms of authority were secured by locks waiting to be picked. The technology and money-making potential of the Internet were far less interesting than the effects people were allowing it to have on their lives and what these, in turn, said about those lives. What was happening on the Internet buttressed a school of thought in sociology known as role theory. The role theorists argue that we have no "self" as such. Our selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves. The Internet had offered up a new set of social situations, to which people had responded by grabbing for a new set of masks. People take on the new tools they are ready for and make use of only what they need, how they need it. If they were using the Internet to experiment with their identities, it was probably because they found their old identities inadequate. If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. The Internet was telling us what we wanted to become. I have already written here about Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year-old boy in the New Jersey suburbs who used the Internet to transform himself into a stock market manipulator. Jonathan's story suggested that you couldn't really understand what was happening on the Internet unless you understood the conditions in the real world that led to what was happening on the Internet -- and you couldn't understand those unless you went there in person and looked around. Once you did that, you came to appreciate all sorts of new truths. For instance, the Internet was rock 'n' roll all over again. Not rock 'n' roll now, but rock 'n' roll in the 1950's and 1960's, when it actually terrified grown-ups. The Internet was enabling a great status upheaval and a subversion of all manner of social norms. And the people quickest to seize on its powers were the young. --SNIP-- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/magazine/15INTERNET.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- geoff.goodfellow () iconia com, Prague CZ * tel/mobil +420 (0)603 706 558 "success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get" http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html
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- IP: HEAR HEAR, what I and others have been saying for a while now djf --- Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq David Farber (Jul 15)