On January 27, 1994, the Today Show ran a hilarious segment trying to unravel this crazy new thing called “The Internet.” A year later, however, it looks like the media had it all figured out. Check out this 1995 MTV trend piece by Kurt Loder: We got a kick out of the clunkiess of the old new media (Compuserve! Dial-up! Netscape!), but Loder also touches on hacking, internet pornography, privacy, and freedom of speech issues that still haven’t been resolved. The biggest shocker of the clip is not how much things have changed but how much they haven’t.
Oh, and also, Moby had hair?
via The Awl
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
One of the interesting things about this news clip that may go unnoticed is the significance of Kurt Loder doing the piece. Kurt was also an Internet pioneer. He invented and coined the term “Podcast”, and he was the original owner of MTV.com. He registered MTV.com after asking the management if he could do it. They said “go ahead, we don’t care about that Internet thing”. Kurt did it and ran MTV.com for himself. Then MTV and their lawyers woke up one day and realized their significant error.
@Eric I think that it was Adam Curry who claimed mtv.com en invented the term Podcast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry