"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"
Back then I thought that Stoll had a point, though he went a bit too far. But he turned out to be very, very wrong.
The problem is the assumed dichotomy. Nobody substitutes network chat for meeting friends or attending live concerts. We augment these experiences.
We use network chat to meet new friends, arrange our meetings with old friends, keep track of distant friends, shop for mail-order coffee, learn about exotic coffees and coffeeshops, and swap hints on the home-roasting of coffee. We figure out which live concerts to go to by watching Youtube and keep track of where and when those concerts are using mailing lists and Myspace.
I'm a classical music idiot, but I own a couple of Vladimir Horowitz CDs. Vladimir is, of course, dead, but I found some video of him on Youtube, and in the comments was a mention of Martha Argerich, an awesome pianist who is still very much alive and is giving a concert not too far from here in August. If it weren't for Youtube I might never have known this woman existed.
I won't say much about sex -- that's what the entire rest of the web is for -- but it seems to me that the web is the most important innovation in the history of sex since birth control.
I agree strongly with your "augment" point, and I'd just like to point out that online communications mediums provide opportunities for expression not possible in other contexts.
For one thing, text chat is a very different art from speaking. Any kind of timing or nonverbal sound has to be expressed somehow in ASCII. Most emoticons are thin symbolic standins for actual face-eye contact, but some emoticons and larger images posted on forums and the like express things you couldn't possibly express verbally.
Now, you may say, hey great, so the next great leap in human relationships is fucking LOLcats. Well, people walk around saying Git 'R Dun to each other in the flesh. In my opinion LOLcats is at least a step up from that. Besides, that's just retarded superpopular images.
Putting aside the base communication, what about file transfers? If I'm chatting with someone, it's trivial to hand over, in a sense, some image or mp3 or document or whatever. And we're both in a position to handle those files: play or edit them or whatever.
So.
Yea.
Communication on the net is far more than just speech without inflection.
"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"