Faster and Better with Age

About the time Sympatico NetLife launched in September 1996, I was ecstatic to be able finally to upgrade from a 14.4 to a 28.8 Kbps modem. Suddenly, when I downloaded large files or surfed graphic-laden Web sites, I wouldn’t have to go upstairs to read a newspaper. I could stay put, drum my fingers and hum a few tunes until the operation was complete. This was speed, I thought. Sadly, I still had to make frequent calls for technical assistance as computer and software problems conspired to do me in.

In his editorial in the launch issue, then-editor Paul Sullivan stated: “Of course, if you’ve spent any time at all on the Internet in its various guises, you wonder how this often cranky, slow-loading, confusing mess of text and graphics can be a threat to anything but your patience. The Internet, whatever else it is, isn’t easy.”

To help readers get over their learning curve, we offered an Internet primer. But our other two features in that issue weren’t about how to use the Internet but what to do with it. They covered surfing the Net for educational and health purposes. We could see the way to go was content and usefulness. People wanted to read TV Guide, not a magazine about what makes TVs work.

Today I sit in front of a Mac G3 computer that I haven’t had to phone a help line about in months, with a high-speed connection that blazes through most tasks, cutting into my newspaper-reading time. Whether I am looking up a phone number, watching a newscast or reviewing film clips for a night out, I am more likely to turn to the Internet than any other source.

While the technology is striving to make itself invisible, it would be foolish to suggest that problems have disappeared. Technical help lines are still humming with frantic calls. However, if you track the level of difficulty of using the Internet from its earliest days to now, you can see a marked progression toward user friendliness.

So in the current issue of Sympatico NetLife, our focus is again on useful sites not user problems. Our cover feature by Jared Mitchell, “The Tao of Gardening” (p. 20), looks at Net resources that will help you make your garden flourish now that the growing season is here. Our second feature, “Strengthening Family Ties” (p. 14), by Ric Mazereeuw, covers how the Net is being used to keep far-flung families in touch through special group Web sites, videoconferencing and so on. One story subject comments how simple it is to use the functions of her MyFamily.com group site, making it readily accessible to her 87-year-old mother.

Elsewhere in the issue, we have stories about buying art online (Good Buys, p. 9), using Webcams to see the world virtually (Fast Lane, p. 11), researching a real trip to Mayo, Ireland (Departure Lounge, p. 42), celebrating local historical figures on the Web in anticipation of Canada Day (Virtual Canada, p. 27) and learning to cope with asthma (Your Health, p. 10).

Almost seven years ago, in the launch issue of Sympatico NetLife, we proudly announced that “the Internet is the most exciting thing to come along since Sputnik.” Now I think the exciting thing is that we don’t find the Internet that exciting. It’s just there—a flexible tool that has become as necessary to us a telephone or car. Who cares how the thing works? So long as it does. @

Peter Giffen, Editor