10/08/2003   English German
  Edition # 46  
San Francisco, 10-08-2003

An Ode to the Internet

Michael When I was a little boy, it was incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get answers to simple questions. I had a 24-volume encyclopedia from some book club that explained the most important words and contained interesting discussions on historical events, but my questions were different: "What is the name of the song currently playing on the radio?" "Why is the sky blue?" "Why does the stack on the HP-41CV have no more than four registers?" No one knew the answers to these questions.

With the internet, now suddenly everything is available. Because there's always someone somewhere who knows exactly what you're looking for. However, the internet is typically American: a bunch of chaos and half of it isn't true. But Google outsmarts this by using clever algorithms to prioritize information that more people find useful.

This is how the internet solves problems today that were difficult to solve in the past: A provider that cheats its customers will be exposed and done for within days. Well-informed consumers quickly put an end to shady providers. Or take eBay, for example: This system of mutual self-regulation actually makes it possible to conduct business by mail with people you've never seen in your life and probably never will meet.

Or when I recently watched the excellent film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and I wondered if I had already seen the actress Zhang Ziyi, who is starring in it, in the Jackie Chan kung fu movie "Rush Hour 2." In the past, no one could have researched such questions. Today, it takes 20 seconds. The answer is: Yes!

And often it happens that I don't understand the lyrics of a song. What an effort that used to be! I can still clearly remember the hours spent rewinding and fast-forwarding to catch even the last scrap of content. Nowadays, that's no longer a problem: You simply enter the snippets of sentences you understand into the search field of "google.com," and the search engine immediately provides dozens of references to websites where diligent helpers have accurately typed out those exact lyrics. Recently, I was puzzled by the word "Shucklak" in the song "Mic Check" by "Rage Against The Machine." No problem: On the Internet I found the exact lyrics to the song and also an explanation of the unusual word: That is the sound a gun makes when being cocked.

And just as we contribute to this revolution with our newsletters and proclaim the unvarnished truth about America, hundreds of thousands of others do the same in their fields of expertise. Who would want to live in another time!

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