This internet thing is never going to catch on.

A classic, via Norm, from Sir Simon Jenkins. Apparently, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media“. Also:

So great is the commercial hyperbole surrounding the Internet that common sense is obliterated by dazzle. It has proved a boon for pornographers and lawyers and for the sort of up market pen pals who used to rave about Citizens’ Band radio. For companies and interest groups, the “interment” is a more efficient version of the fax. E-mail has done wonders for the ancient art of letter-writing. I can see that being able to download the entire British Library on to one’s kitchen table, or cruise the Louvre from one’s armchair, is in theory exhilarating. But like Heath Robinson’s suggestions for winning the Great War, the concept is unlikely to have widespread application.

The Internet is one more electronic craze that market forces will sooner or later put in its proper context. For the time being, its fanatical proponents need the sympathy and tolerance once extended to Esperantists and radio hams. In the history of science, I would place the Internet well behind the word processor, the telephone and the light bulb.

The bedrock of this magnificent prediction? The belief that books are better than the internet. And here’s a problem with newspaper punditry: lots of people are saying B is better than A so the conventions of the genre demand I scribble a column arguing that, despite B’s trendiness, A is actually better than B. Much of the time, of course, A and B aren’t even competing with one another and, anyway, normal people will like A sometimes and B some other times. In life, unlike the newspapers, you can actually have both.

Jenkins almost understands this when he writes that it is “absurd” for “screen communication to require for its self-esteem the ridiculing of books”. The effect of this unusually penetrating insight is only slightly spoilt by its presence in a column boosting the self-esteem of bound-books by ridiculing electronic communication and reading.

Faster does not always mean better but it does allow for more which can also mean better. Perhaps it doesn’t make us happier or better – though I think it probably does – but the internet and all the spin-offs are, I think, something more* than just a “more efficient” fax machine.

True, Jenkins wrote this column in February 1997 which is a long, long time ago in computing. But even then I think one could see- or I dimly recall – the sense that the web really was going to have quite an impact. Hindsight is always happy and always beating foresight to a pulp.

Anyway, Simon Jenkins is still writing columns for the Guardian and anyone else who can afford him. These are available on screens too even though the internet has been rather better for readers than it has been for newspaper proprietors.

*It’s also helping kill the telephone and that’s a good thing too.