The fizzle fades

The Web was once everything new, everything wild, and everything you could have ever imagined. But, as Yasmine El-Rashidi discovers, in reality it was an era that never quite came, and has not quite left
It is interesting how the human mind can change, adapt and acclimatise almost overnight. One minute we are content with our lives and what they bring. The next we are not.
The so-called era of the Internet brought a classic case of man-made hysteria into the spotlight. In a zap that registered in our minds as an overnight occurrence, everyone was addicted to e-mail, the "World Wide Web," and the need to surf. The Internet, it seemed, had taken over the world. Well, almost.
This part of the world caught on to the trend a little late. Nevertheless, Egypt did finally jump on the bandwagon and it did not take long for an entire nation to become tantalised by cyber-space and the vacuum of its limits. It was justified, of course, for it was new, it was news, and in the beginning, it was rare.
Things change fast, and what was once a fad filled with promise sort of "plunked," so to speak. It started with the slow demise of "surfing" excitement, and then it bombed with the debacle now known as the "portal fiasco" that hit the country two years ago and left many in the financial and psychological doldrums.
It may have just been the inevitable deflation of a media package injected with too much hype, or it may indeed have been a ripple in the global Internet sea of collapse. Whatever the case, one cannot quite hold the Egyptian public at fault for the half-hearted coming of its Internet age. Like all else, the nation followed closely in the footsteps of its high-tech mama: the United States. There, things have been significantly worse.
"An honest evaluation would have to admit it has been a very bad year for hip start-up companies, hi-tech investors and hundreds of thousands of workers in the technology field," wrote Kevin Kelly in the Wall Street Journal on 4 January. "Three trillion dollars lost on NASDAQ, 500 failed dot.coms, and half a million hi-tech jobs gone. Even consumers in the street are underwhelmed by look-alike gizmos and bandwidth that never came."
The Web's many promises, popular consensus has pronounced, have fallen short.
"We lost our sense of wonder. The Web is old hat," Lenn Davis, founder of the once- raving URL "Cool site of the day" told The New York Times last month.
"Today," the reporter Lisa Guernsey wrote, "Mr Davis has not only kicked his Web habit, but also almost completely given up the medium." A trapeze-type turn-around for a man who was once a self-professed addict and media-made Internet celebrity.
The celebrations to welcome the Web medium and its prospects ended long ago, and globally it appears that all that is left are the glittering paper remnants of a carnival and the few lingering souls who are not quite ready to go home.
Egypt, of course, is no real exception, at least in terms of public interest. The Internet cafés that were once sprouting like weeds around the city seemed to have suddenly hit their own growth ceilings. Then they began to shrivel. While the shutting down of handfuls of these cyber-hubs could be seen as part and parcel of the entire country's economic stumble and consequent slump last summer, the reduced usage rates of LE5 per hour -- down from LE20 just 12 months ago -- might have provided the perfect compromise for Web addicts who may have been hit by the monetary hard times.
Reality, however, was more hard-hitting. The "WWW," it seemed, had lost its flair. The public began to act as if the Internet had seen its glory days.
For Egypt, this is an unfortunately untimely result, given that the government has finally begun to pour its energies into its high-gear, high-tech agenda: transforming the country into an information society by connecting the masses and bridging the digital divide.
The government's national Information Technology (IT) and communications agenda -- endorsed by President Hosni Mubarak and god- fathered by Minister of Communications and Information Technology Ahmed Nazif -- has begun to see results in recent months. The most notable changes include: the advent of free Internet -- launched in the country this January by Telecom Egypt, the country's incumbent telephone service provider; the graduation of thousands of IT specialists from the ministry's joint-venture education programmes with specialised multinationals in the field; and the establishment of Internet Technology Clubs (ITCs) in areas catering to lesser privileged communities -- providing Internet access and training for nominal fees. And those are just a sliver of the government-backed awareness and promotion projects for the medium.
So will their efforts now be in vain? In a way -- but not entirely. For while the excitement of the new gimmick may have defused with its maturing, its advantages as a mere utility -- an efficient one at that -- are far from fad-type fetishes. The bottom line amidst the Internet chatter is that it boils down to a matter of perspective.
"I think the Internet is more important than ever, not less," Sree Sreenivasan, a renowned new media expert in the US and new media professor at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Sure, it's lost some of its sexiness and the buzz, but there are millions of people coming on-line around the world every month, and they are coming for a reason: to be better informed, to learn, to have fun. Never has a medium meant so much to so many in such a quick time."
The guru is right -- on all counts. Even in Egypt, the figures are on the up and up. The enthralled faces glued to monitors in cafés around the nation may have turned solemn, but that is not to say that the Internet has failed. We may not have quite mastered the making of a portal or mega e-commerce site, and we are not quite on target with revolutionary content- providing cyber locales, but that is no good reason why the rest of the nation's population -- the millions who are not yet Internet-adept -- should be deprived of the opportunity to learn from what is, when push comes to shove, the greatest educational tool ever to hit the planet.
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