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 <dave () farber net>]

> 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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