John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999
openculture.com
openculture.com
It was incredibly frustrating trying to learn linux and programming on my own in a household having religious parents who saw everything with a screen as corrupting Television/Videogames. It was, I shit you not, a constant war just to be able to study anything directly involving the computer.
It did give me a great appreciation for large textbooks though. Even if they were about computer topics, nobody gave me hell for spending hours with books about C or operating systems. Do the same thing interactively at the computer? Forget about it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/0...
Watching it it seemed to me it had little to do with anything but the patronizing and condescending view that some people might have of small town America.
It's ironic because the narrow-mindendness with which they painted these ostensible 'small town idiots', was in fact on full display by the authors themselves.
Edit: double irony, it's made by Lycos i.e. one of the emblematic 'dot com crash companies' i.e. yes, they are on to something but are promoting ridiculous valuations trying to punch way, way above their economic weight, and to boot, not seeing the writing on the wall as the search landscape evolved. While Lycos has basically vanished, the auto-shop in my hometown is literally still there, same company though it's changed from one family to another.
All of the various school libraries and the public library were online by 1997. We did have nice public schools and a solid public library, it gave me an immense appreciation for those. So even if a household didn't happen to have a PC, the family still had free or very low cost access to get online.
I'm sure there are some horror stories of small towns and access from that time. That wasn't my experience. The relatively low cost of setting up an ISP and the phone network access made it very easy to get online in the mid 1990s where I grew up. The nearest major metro was ~120 miles away. Intellectually and culturally the Web was an oasis in a desert, it gave me access to ideas and people from all over the world at a time when the Web still felt like a small experimental mosh pit of people interlinking. Growing up in a small town likely made my Web experience more vivid and energized than what you would have experienced had you grown up in NYC. I instantly got the value proposition it was offering the first time I used it, it was subtle like a bolt of lightning to the skull.
It's also funny because I think that the internet is still overrated, moreover, some of the supposed 'outdated' virtues lamented in the video (by virtue of the fact they are promoted by the out-of-touch luddite father) would be the 'your sister will appreciate her education more because she worked hard for it' ... I think that's a rather timelessly good piece of advice.
And the doofus mechanic literally watching cartoons, while avoiding work, who could not find the engine on the car? How long do you think he lasts in a small town where word travels fast? In my 'home town' the mechanic guy is utterly competent and trustworthy. And frankly creative and smart, he actually enjoys solving problems all day every day.
[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/