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I wonder how many times Steve Maich used Google, Yahoo! or other search engines to do some basic research on “The Internet sucks,” his cover story of this week’s Maclean’s. I’m assuming not at all, or else he would have realized two things: that the Internet has created significant, positive changes in society, and that most people identified the gap between Internet hype and reality several years ago.

What better way to follow up a recent column on how great an employer Wal-Mart is (no, I’m not kidding) than six full pages devoted to the problems associated with online gambling, pornography and identity theft? Maich makes deploring references to the money invested in unused fibre optic cable, the growing skepticism about the veracity of Web content, copyright scuffles – stop me when you’ve heard something new here. There’s an old adage that the Canadian market lags the rest of the world by about six to 18 months, but even for a weekly publication Maich’s feature story reads like something unearthed from a time capsule.

Given that it’s easy to talk about what’s wrong with the Internet, Maich spends precious little space talking about what’s working. Based on the authority of a single professor, he concludes that the Internet is useful but has failed to offer anything new to the world. “The internal combustion engine, refrigeration, even air conditioning, had profound impacts on our lives, making the impossible practical. The Web does nothing of the sort,” Maich writes. “E-mails replace faxes and phone calls. Online shopping replaces sales that used to be made through a catalogue. And for all but the most socially isolated, every hour spent trolling through chat rooms replaces an hour that might otherwise have been spent in real, live conversation.”

There are almost too many points to quibble over in that paragraph (like the fact that e-mails replaced formal letters, not phone calls, for example) so I’ll try to stick with its central premise. The Internet has made the impossible practical by exchanging (primarily text-based) data over greater distances at greater speeds than previous technologies. The new things it created are not necessarily objects but processes. For just one example, the offshore outsourcing of labour would be anything but practical were it not for the ability to conduct work during off-peak hours in a foreign country and submit the finished results into Web-based systems that span continents. That has had a profound impact on local economies in offshore countries, the education and career possibilities for those workers as well as a shift in focus for those who had previously done such work in North America. I could cite a lot more, but I’d just be reprinting what we publish every day on this Web site.

Even if the demand for Internet connectivity doesn’t live up to the predictions of early adopters, the unused fibre sitting below the ocean floor is the foundation for future applications in voice, video and more. But now I’m sounding like the hipsters Miach says are “still selling the same old tune.” Instead, maybe I could make this argument: “(The Internet) is now so deeply entrenched in our culture – in the way we speak and work and think – that they only thing to do is to try and make it better.” That actually comes near the end of Maich’s article, and bizarrely contradicts the lack of impact he claims the Internet has had on society.

Sadly, Maich didn’t offer any ideas on how we might address the Internet’s growing pains, which is what they really are. Diagnosing a disease without putting any effort into its cure? Now that sucks.

sschick@itbusiness.ca

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