Since we’re fans of tech nostalgia here at Technologizer, I thought I’d share the document with you. Surprisngly, many of the Internet’s perks and problems remain the same 15 years later, but some of them just seem silly in retrospect.

(Click on the image to view an enlarged version.)

Some thoughts:

• Although the Internet is quite different now from what it was in 1996, its advantages–communicating with anyone around the world, consuming all kinds of content and getting information quickly–haven’t fundamentally changed. No one uses chat rooms anymore, though.
• The rise of reputable sources on the Internet, combined with a more savvy user base, means reliability of information isn’t a huge issue today. Of course, you can’t believe everything you read, but that was true even before the Internet.
• I suppose there are still “MANY” dead links on the Internet. But I rarely notice.
• The paper seems optimistic that some day, the Internet will be secure. Hasn’t happened yet. And with users putting more information about themselves on the Internet than ever before, security is arguably a bigger issue than it was 15 years ago. One hack is all it takes for your personal details to get out.
• The Internet is more organized today, but information overload remains, thanks to countless blogs and endless social network streams–none of which existed 15 years ago.
• The idea that spending “hours” on the Internet was once classified as addiction now seems hilarious to me.

(Thanks, Heather.)

They keep on conducting these surveys, and news sites and blogs keep reporting the results as news. And somehow, the news is always that people would rather give up sex than give up gadgets–even when the surveys show that most people prefer sex to gadgets.

Let’s review the evidence:

August 2011: TeleNav commissions a survey that shows that 33 percent of Americans would rather give up sex than give up their phones.

Also this month: Digital textbook company Kno commissions a survey that shows that a quarter of college students would give up sex to avoid lugging heavy textbooks.

Last month: Sliderocket commissions a survey that shows that almost a quarter of Americans would rather give up sex than sit through a PowerPoint presentation.

August 2010: British online casino Inter Casino commissions a survey that shows that more Britons would give up sex than would give up Facebook to win a jackpot.

August 2010: Yahoo commissions a survey that shows that one-third of our neighbors to the north would rather give up sex than give up the Internet.

May 2010: The World Wildlife Federation commissions a survey that shows that only 2 percent of Canadians would rather give up sex than give up their cars. Did that lead to newspaper headlines along the lines of “98 Percent of Canadians Would Give Up Their Cars Before Giving Up Sex?” Of course not!

February 2010: This has nothing to do with technology, but Maple Leaf Foods commissions a survey that shows that 43 percent pf Canadians would rather give up sex than give up bacon.

October 2009: Samsung commissions a survey that shows that 31 percent of Bostonians would rather give up sex than give up their phones.

February 2009: Marrakesh Records commissions a survey that (at least as interpreted by one story) shows that the majority of British teens would rather give up sex than go without music for one week–but the music must be in the form of free downloads.

December 2008: Intel commissions a survey that shows that 46 percent of women would rather give up sex than give up the Internet.

February 2008: British electronics retailer comet commissions a survey that shows that nearly half of British men would give up sex in return for a 50-inch plasma TV.

June 2007: British phone retailer Carphone Warehouse commissions a survey that shows that a majority of Britons between the age of 16 and 24 would rather give up sex for a month than give up their mobile phones.

August 2004: Philips Electronics commissions a survey that shows that 21 percent of Americans would give up sex for a month to get a home theater.

September 1994: Very few Americans are on the Internet or own mobile phones. So Magnavox commissions a survey that shows that 18 percent of women and 9 percent of men would rather give up sex than give up their TV remote for one week.

Way back in August 1984: In a pioneering study, Forum magazine commissions a survey that shows that 73 percent of Americans would give up sex for a year in return for one million dollars. (They coulda spent the million on a Commodore 64, a Colecovision, Walkman, a CB radio, a really fancy turntable…)

So what can we learn from all this research?

Sex sells. Want to get your company’s name into print? Easy. Conduct a survey asking people to choose between your product category and sex. Done!

Summer is the slowest season for news. And therefore the easiest season to make news with news that isn’t news. More than half of these surveys were released in July or August.

A certain percentage of survey respondents will say they prefer anything to sex. I haven’t seen any stories claiming that Americans would give up sex before they’d give up Bluetooth mice. Or USB drives. Or defragging utilities. But I’ll bet there are makers of Bluetooth mice, USB drives, and defraggers fielding surveys even as we speak.

But it doesn’t really matter what the results are. As little as two percent of respondents can choose technology over sex.  The headlines will still be about people spurning sex for technology.

A surprising number of people are apparently willing to answer really silly, really personal questions. I wonder if the best response to all of these questions–”None of your freaking business, jerkface”–is ever one of the options?

Photo by Flickr user Secretlondon.

I know it’s possible to live without access to the Internet. (Hey, I lived the first fifteen years or so of my life before I heard the dulcet tone of a dial-up modem connection for the first time.) But a funny thing has happened as broadband, cellular networks, and Wi-Fi have put the Internet within my reach the vast majority of the time: I’ve gotten really bad at doing without the Net.

Case in point: Earlier this month, I flew from San Francisco to Alicante, Spain, for an event called the IFA Global Press Conference. The trek involved three plane flights and took close to 24 hours. And aside from a couple layovers, during which I fiddled my iPhone and futzed with iffy airport Wi-Fi, I was disconnected the whole time.
The experience made me antsy, in part because I was cut off from a bunch of the tools I use to do my job, including Google Docs, Gmail, and WordPress. I felt incapacitated and isolated, even though I had brought both a laptop and an iPad with me. I started mourning the fact that Virgin America, my favorite airline–it has Wi-Fi on all its flights–unaccountably doesn’t offer service to Alicante, Spain.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I kind of liked being deprived of Internet access on most flights: I’d buy a stack of magazines to read, snooze, and otherwise relax rather than work, work, work. But somewhere along the way, my brain rewired itself. It wants the Net, as surely as a cigarette addict’s brain wants nicotine.

(Incidentally, I ended spending a chunk of the trip writing a TIME.com column–this one–in Word. For years, Word was my most-used piece of technology, but lately it’s become That Word Processor I Use When I Can’t Get Online.)

Airplanes aren’t the only places where the Internet doesn’t go, though–I know of dead spots in San Francisco where, as far as I can tell, there’s no publicly-available Wi-Fi and no adequate coverage from any major wireless carrier. And speaking of Wi-Fi, as useful as it is, it’s often rotten–at many hotels, it’s so sluggish, sporadic, and otherwise erratic that it may not be better than no Internet access at all. (If you hold out hope that you might be able to get online, you waste hours trying to do so; if you know you can’t, you don’t bother to try.)

I may be an extreme case: I make my living writing a blog, and you can’t blog if you can’t get online. But I’m not that much of an outlier. A lot of us look forward to the day when Internet access is truly pervasive in a way it still isn’t. And tech companies are already introducing products–like Google’s Chrome OS--that are built for a world of truly dependable, universal Internet access even though it’s not here yet.

Thinking about this, I looked back at the history of consumer Internet access (and before that, access to proprietary online services). There have been five eras so far:

The early years (late 1970s-early 1990s): If you were online at at all–which was not a given, since plenty of computer users weren’t–you paid an hourly rate to dial into a proprietary online service such as CompuServe, GEnie, or an upstart called AOL. (Sometimes a stiff hourly rate: It could cost more than $30 an hour to use CompuServe once you’d paid for network access.) You might also have dialed into free bulletin-board systems, some of which were only available when their proprietors weren’t using their computers for something else.

The middle years (mid-1990s-turn of the century):You were on dial-up. You still encountered the occasional busy signal. And unless you had two phone lines, using the Internet meant you couldn’t receive phone calls on your home number. But at least you paid a flat rate for all-you-could-eat access to the entire World Wide Web.

The recent years (turn of the century to a few years ago): You had broadband, eliminating the need to dial out and hog a phone line.

Right now: You’ve got broadband–faster, more reliable broadband than you had a few years ago–and a smartphone that puts most of the Internet in your pocket, as long as you’ve got coverage.

The next era will come when it’s truly unusual to be without Internet access. We’ll know it’s here when not being able to get online when you’re out, about, or in the air is just as unusual as it is for wired broadband at home to conk out today. It’ll be a time when smartphones just work, when Wi-Fi is bulletproof, and every domestic and international flight is Internet-ready.

I think that day will come, and while I don’t know when it’ll arrive, I’m going to be awfully disappointed if 2020 rolls around and it’s not here.

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As I followed the news about the humongous outages at Amazon and Sony’s PlayStation Network, I thought back to major outages of years past–which reminded me that I wrote a story called “A Brief History of Internet Outages” back in August of 2008, early in Technologizer’s storied history. It covered crippling glitches at AOL, Skype, Windows Update, and elsewhere–and if I were writing it all over again, the new Amazon and Sony downtimes might have headed the list. Here’s the story again.

It’s not cheap, though. It set you back $450 initially — that’s a $250 installation fee and then $200 per month for the service itself when it was first introduced last year. But for those speed hungry, Comcast is now offering it for $105 per month for a full year if ordered as part of their Triple Play offering.

You have to have a frame of reference to understand how fast this is: a high definition movie that would have taken an hour and a half on a standard cable connection now takes five minutes: an album from your favorite band that would have taken almost a minute before now takes only three seconds.

Don’t go all nuts though, as there still is a bandwidth cap. Comcast says connections would be throttled after 250GB of bandwidth, which while unfortunate begins to make sense at speeds like this. If everybody’s downloading high-definition movies at the same time, you’d have to think it would slow everybody down!

In Egypt, the Mubarak regime shut down the Internet in the country in an effort to curtail the organization efforts of anti-government protesters. That hasn’t worked too well, and Internet connections were restored in the country this morning. The effort seems to have shone new light on “kill switch” efforts here.

Senators behind the bill–Connecticut’s Joseph Lieberman, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Delaware’s Tom Carper–aren’t too happy with the Egypt comparisons. “We would never sign on to legislation that authorized the President, or anyone else, to shut down the Internet,” they said in a joint statement. ”Emergency or no, the exercise of such broad authority would be an affront to our Constitution.”

The president already has the authority to shut down radio communications providers, but the laws are vague. The senators argue more specificity is need to prevent abuses of this power. Second, they point out that the president could only authorize such actions in the most extreme of circumstances — while still being mindful the action is not violating free speech rights.

Either way, Mubarak’s actions have put the three Senator’s efforts in a bad light. While the bill may have good intentions, I don’t see the necessity for such action. Plus if worse comes to worse, the government is going to do what it needs to do, law or not.

What are your feelings on giving the government such power? Is it a wise idea to have some type of way to shut things down in an attack, or is a case of government overreach? I’d be interested in hearing from you, and I’m sure there is going to be diversity of opinion on this one.

Essentially, we’re talking about a system that no longer knows where anything is. Outsiders can’t find Egyptian websites, and insiders can’t find anything at all. It’s as if the postal system suddenly erased every address inside America — and forgot that it was even called America in the first place.

Now, a group called Open Sarcasm is staging a protest to crush SarcMark and replace it with an upside-down exclamation mark (¡), which text fields already recognize and doesn’t cost a dime. Open Sarcasm’s organizer even came back to our original blog post to let us know about it.

The group says “¡” is graphically indistinguishable from Temherte Slaqî, an Ethiopic symbol that comes at the end of a sentence, used to indicate an unreal phrase or a sarcastic tone in editorial cartoons. No joke, Open Sarcasm pulls the idea from Wikipedia’s page on sarcasm, which sources a document (PDF) from the 15th International Unicode Conference.

Despite the subject matter, Open Sarcasm appears to be dead serious, writing a manifesto that specifically calls out the SarcMark, starting a Twitter page and opening an online merch store. Of course, the group is also accepting donations, for what I’m not sure.

I still don’t think punctuation for sarcasm is necessary — words alone leave plenty of room for nuance in tone — but a movement to liberate sarcastic punctuation from commercial gain is admirable, at least.