Riding to Venice on the internet express

By NEIL PORTEN

The internet is the late 20th century's equivalent of the 19th century's railways. Right? Well, that's one of the comparisons that have been used to try to account for the influence of the internet on our economic and social lives.

But how valid is the rail metaphor, and what other images and parallels have observers used to explain the web?

The rapid expansion of e-commerce, the creation of dotcom millionaires and billionaires, the frenzy of all and sundry to have a "web presence", and the subsequent bubble-bursting tech wreck all echo the boom in railways in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In an article titled "The Internet Express" Livio Di Matteo acknowledges these similarities but expands on the limitations of the comparison. Rail created a new transport network for moving goods.

The internet and e-commerce have reduced the costs of doing business in the traditional primary, secondary and service industries.

Di Matteo writes: "The internet would be the equivalent of the railroad if it could move people and goods through space and time as quickly as it does data."

He points out that railroads and the internet are capital-intensive activities, but the huge capital outlay on rail could not be recouped until major routes were completed.

This led to company failures and government bailouts on a scale incomparable to government support for other industries today.

Capital is invested in the internet by many large and small enterprises and individuals, spreading the risk and the failures.

The way trucks usurped railways in the freight business in the early 20th century, offering flexibility and lower costs, is an illustration used to indicate the future of the web. Open source operating systems and Apache web servers offer the same flexibility and low costs, as well as reliability, which will overthrow the proprietary technology of the net.

Unsurprisingly this vision comes from Red Hat, a firm selling software based on the open source Linux operating system.

The rail/internet metaphor isn't quite on the right track then. How about the "information superhighway"? Not according to one commentator.

"Sure, in some places, it is an eight-lane highway. But in many others, it's still a one-lane dirt road with deep ruts".

The internet is, instead, an "information flea market" - you're free to browse any stall at any time and people selling at a flea market do so independently of each other.

The frontier, highway or railway, the town hall, a library, television, a gateway, a mall - all these metaphors have been used to try to grasp the web's impact . Communications Revolutions has links to some interesting academic work on internet metaphors and a striking image of the web being like Venice in February.

Geoffrey Nunberg says: "You thread your way down foggy streets and over bridges till you lose all sense of compass direction, and then all of a sudden you break into some glorious piazza. The rusty gate on the alley over there might open into a lush garden, and behind that might be a palazzo, but you can't see anything from the street."

This virtual Rialto is a perfect image of the internet except for one thing. Go back to Venice in 50 years and everything will be where it was when you left. On the internet, there's no guarantee anything will be in the same place tomorrow.

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