Well said Herb. On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 1:49 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Jeff jonas says:
giving them the false sense of entitlement that Internet access is a "right". No, like driving, it is a PRIVILEGE.
"The Internet" was many things at many points in time. The ARPAnet was VERY privileged - for national defense and research. So it was something, then it became something else. Technology which was once scarce, but becomes a commodity, does that. My recent post described "scarcity" of personal computing technology.
Many people lament the loss of the past. But this forum is not a political or social-action arena. So a discussion of the politics of the Internet is likely off-topic. I am not in charge so that's merely my working opinion.
I will not debate rights versus privileges here, except to say Internet access is such an essential service to live and work in this country, that I think calling it a "privilege" and thus revocable is less than optimal.
As for the past of social behavior, yeah, many people behave poorly these days on da Internets, and we also get access to that along with everything else we get. I don't think that's new. Imagine if you had to sit on a streetcorner in a busy city, and see *every single thing that happened there*. Now imagine, someone else feeds you views of the worst of it - for "free" (free access so your name is sold to people who want to sell you stuff). Who do we blame for that, eh?
The burning of the library of Alexandria pales in comparison to the information and personal effort destroyed every time a hard drive fails or a major web page does down.
I don't know that. "It's harder to delete than it is to save". Stuff gets lost over time but there's services that preserve some of it and there's a lot of duplication. And a lot of stuff is very "forgetable". The Alexandria library was like destroying HALF "the internet" of the era (the other half being held in other cultures).
A value of vintage computing is to preserve history, in various forms. People are telling their stories, they are informative and are being preserved by telling. I'm a technologist by training, I preserve physical stuff, but it has human meaning and a context of development and use. I have stumbled into history.
Regards, Herb Johnson
-- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT info