Will the World Wide Web Catch On?

Will the World Wide Web ever catch on? Today this question looks ridiculous. But, at one point in time the question was very serious. And that moment in time provides us with a revealing story about technology and its acceptance.

The World Wide Web was beginning to capture of attention of IT people in the early to middle 1990's. In order to take advantage of this emerging technology I developed an experimental course entitled "Corporate Web Applications". Most people, at the time, found this to be greatly amusing as the idea of using this glitzy technology for serious business applications was beyond the pale. Even to techies this idea was questionable as most websites were the very definition of poor taste with a garish montage of poorly chosen colors. And, of course, there was the outstanding technical problem of asynchronous database interaction. It did not look promising.

But, the larger barriers were not technical or graphic. They were the usual resistance to new ideas that people have when considering a new technology. As I mentioned earlier, you can always recognize this resistance to the new as people will resort to a standard set of talking points. I told my classes that in the future you would buy things over the Web. It would become the preferred place to shop and the first place you would go for information. But, as obvious as these predictions are in hindsight, they were anything but obvious at the time.

How can you buy clothes that you can't try on? How can you buy a book without leafing through it first? How can you buy any product that you cannot first touch. There seemed to be a prevailing belief that you some how needed to shake a box before you could buy a product. There were visions of clothes that didn't fit; products that fell apart as soon as you opened the box; and vendors who would not return emails, let alone products. And if that were enough, how could you give your credit card number to somebody at a strange website. This conjured up visions of some social misfit with a sleeveless shirt, spiked hair, tattoos, piecing, and endless chains hanging off of anything you could hook a chain to who had created this site for no other reason than to steal your credit card number. No that wouldn't do at all.

I recall a group project one semester where the students were illustrating the perils of shopping over the web. They began with a skit. A well built young man walks into the class wearing a t shirt that was clearly two or three sizes too small.

A woman in the skit, presumably playing his wife, says "Where did you get that shirt? It is way too small". 

He answers, "I bought it over the web and didn't have a chance to try it on".

She, then, responds, "I told you not to buy things over the web. You got exactly what you deserve"

The students in the audience nodded gravely in agreement. Yes, if you buy something over the web, you will get what you deserve.

Now, to put things into perspective, consider the following two statements:

1) You cannot touch the people in Second Life and you do not know who they really are.
2) You cannot try on clothes you buy on the web and you don't know who you are buying them from.

These are both talking points about emerging technologies. They are both true. But as we find out over time neither of them matter. They are both examples of how we evaluate a new technology in terms of the way the world is today rather than in terms of the world that they technology helps to create.