Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet

Virtual Dreams

Virtual Folklore: Breaking the News about the Internet

Inter-what? Never heard of it.

Isn’t that the fancy government network that’s been around for years? Academics use it. . . . So what’s the big deal?

Let me know when it’s real; sounds like vaporware to me.

Nobody seemed to understand what all the fuss was about. Being the first to break a story can have its disadvantages. First, there is no one to validate your discovery; so you know that professionally you are about as far out on a limb as you are ever going to get. You shift around a lot psychologically and never quite get comfortable with your cherished piece of information. Second, you find yourself slipping into missionary mode a bit too often, occasionally exhibiting the strained, too earnest quality of a UFO abductee: "Yes, I know that no one else heard the tree falling in the forest. But I did, I was there, it was real." You know you have to avoid making the story sound like too big a deal, sounding too earnest and, well, scaring people away.

But in my case, the falling tree was a giant redwood: the beginnings of a commercialized Internet, not only a new technology but a major paradigm shift in the technological landscape. My magazine, Telecommunications, had gotten the scoop, and I was the editor who had snagged the story. With the pain and difficulty that only a steep learning curve can inflict, I found out that it is indeed possible to get a scoop too early. Spreading the news was a bit like lecturing in a large hall when only twenty or thirty people have shown up. The problem was that there was no critical mass and no way to produce it. Even if I had appeared on CNN and trumpeted my findings to the global village, no one would really have known what I was talking about. (Well, Vinton Cerf, considered by many to be the father of the Internet, would have known, of course; and so would the small number of academics who understood—really understood—what was about to happen.) No, this kind of news would take time to develop and to be fully appreciated.

I broke the story about the Internet’s move into the commercial market in 1991, a full two years or so before the mainstream press locked onto the Internet like a heat-seeking missile in 1993. As senior editor of Telecommunications, I was in possession of the biggest communications story of the decade, trying to figure out what to do with it.

The saga, fraught with many twists and turns and its own particular brand of journalistic angst, began one perfectly ordinary Sunday afternoon in 1991 when I received an e-mail message that would rock the foundations of my professional and personal life for the next year or so. The message was from Brian Kahin, who headed up Harvard University’s Information Infrastructure Project. (Kahin would go on to play a key role in the Clinton administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.) Kahin had sent me a classic news tip: The Internet, which had up to that point been largely a behind-the-scenes academic network, was about to be let loose as a commercialized entity. Why Kahin had chosen to leak this news to me I was not sure, but I knew that I had a journalistic tiger by the tail as I gazed at the message scrolling across my laptop’s silver-blue screen.

Back in 1991, the Internet was the world’s best kept secret. Its primary users were academics and defense contractors, and it existed in a world apart from the telecommunications industry. For the most part, even the more knowledgeable and savvy telecommunications experts did not pay much attention to it—if they knew that it existed at all. The same, amazingly enough, applied to most of the senior executives of the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, as they came to be known.

Kahin’s e-mail was a blockbuster because it addressed the incipient commercialization of the Internet. This meant that the Net was about to be unleashed from the relatively narrow confines of academia and a hitherto slumbering beast was about to wake up and conquer the world. Internet commercialization would mean that private industry could develop and market Internet technology as aggressively and effectively as it had personal computers. This event would eventually transform the Internet into a publicly available network that could be used by anyone with access to a personal computer and a telephone line. This breakthrough was going to massively transform communications and most other areas of human endeavor as well, including business, education, science, and entertainment.

Kahin’s e-mail put all of my cognitive resources on red alert. Could it be that I had the scoop of the decade in front of me? I had to find out, and I began researching the story in the most logical and convenient fashion available—by using my networked computer. The first task was verification. I initiated an extended e-mail conversation with Kahin on the significance of the commercialization angle. Eventually, he convinced me that this was no mere speculation and that commercialization was imminent. But I needed more perspective, and I also needed to make sure I did not inadvertently tip my hand to competing publications in the course of doing the background