Over its first twenty years, the net (first the ARPAnet, then the
Internet) was an incredibly valuable tool for cooperation, collaboration,
mutual help, research and development, standards generation, and
innovation.  "Content" was constantly being added to it -- software, all
kinds of information, discussions of new ideas, etc.  Most of this content
came in the form of text: source code, prose, bibliographic information,
messages, email, conferences, etc.

Then, at some point in the recent past, the net became the Information
Superhighway -- an object of commerce and mass consumerism.  Which is not
a bad thing: it's a kind of public recognition of all the hard work and
deep thought that went into building the net and building up its vast
resources of content.

But at the same, the net became "easy to use".  To grossly simplify what
this means: one no longer actively accesses the net in "read/write" mode;
rather, one passively points and clicks on things.  Most of the modern net
access software is designed to extract things from the net, rather than
add things to it.  It's as if the content had become frozen in time,
except, of course, for all the commercial offerings.  It's like a museum,
in which everybody looks at the items on display and then stops at the
gift shop on the way out and spends a pile of money.  Soon, even the items
on display will lose their attraction, and we will be left with nothing
but an electronic shopping mall.

There has been a lot of discussion in various fora (sorry, forums) to the
effect that "text is dead".  I, for one, would like to think calmer heads
will prevail.  NOTHING can replace text, because anything else that you can
think of depends on some particular interpreter that runs only on some
specific operating-system/hardware-platform, and all of these items become
obsolete with amazing speed in today's fast-paced marketplace.

Take e-mail as an example.  Why are we still stuck with a primitive 7-bit
ASCII form of exchange?  Because nothing else works.  Everything else, at
best, depends on viewers and interpreters that the recipient probably does
not have because they are platform-dependent (MIME or no MIME), and at
worst, doesn't even get delivered because of transparency problems.

200 years from now, if anybody happens to have carried this message
forward across the many changes that will have occurred in storage media,
nobody will have any trouble reading it.  I don't think you can say the
same for any other form of electronically stored information.

Which brings us back to the original posting.  Internet Service Providers
should not be quite so quick to lock out people who wish to access the net
text mode, because those are the very people who are most likely to keep
adding content and value to the net (unless your definition of "value"
happens to include surreptitiously scanned-in centerfold pictures :-)

- Frank