In our second week of our Intro to Digital Communication class for Communications@Syracuse, we read and discussed a rather pessimistic article from Newsweek circa 1995 by Clifford Paul “Cliff” Stoll an astronomer, author and teacher.

In the article, Dr. Stoll, in great detail, discounts the ability of the then-burgeoning Internet and e-commerce to make much difference in the world.

Turns out he was wrong–and he freely admitted that on BoingBoing in 2010: “Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler … Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff …”

But you can’t blame him for his cynicism 20 years ago, the Internet was still growing and technology was far from what it is today. Maybe, however, you can cite him for a lack of vision, for the faith that once the market got a firmer hold on the growing technology, things would improve dramatically–as they did.

As much as six years after Dr. Stoll’s piece, I remember, on September 11, 2001, trying to get current video and reports and what was going on in New York while sitting at my desk at work, and not being able to because the strain on the web was too great and every site claiming to offer real-time news was crashing or so stalled that all you got was revolving circles.

“They’re going to need to fix this if this thing is going to work,” I thought. And they did soon after. Maybe that was a turning point.

Dr. Stoll points to a number of not-quite-there-yet technologies that he believed at the time would never pan out: telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, multimedia classrooms, virtual communities, e-commerce and electronic books, to name a few.  He also describes the Internet as a “wasteland of unfiltered data.” Right again–at the time.

My point is that the commercialization of digital media corrected all those shortcomings. Broadband solved my concern–streaming media is second nature now, it can be watched on a phone without a second thought. Amazon developed the Kindle and Apple came out with the iPad to make reading e-books better. Skype developed the technology making virtual meetings possible. Pay-Pal made shopping secure.

Anything is possible, and if enough people want it, someone out there will sell it. And in the end, that’s how technology advances. The digital convergence wouldn’t have been possible without the dissatisfaction expressed by Dr. Stoll–and a public willing to pay for the future.

Is the web Nirvana? No, it’s not–Dr. Stoll’s point about a lack of human contact was prophetic. But  it’s pretty darn close, closer at least than he gave it credit for.