March 24, 1997

Over the last few weeks there has been an alarming
surge in volume around “push technology,” the latest
Internet buzzword. Everywhere you turn, someone is
predicting that the arrival of push signals the death of
the World Wide Web browser and, at last, an era of
commercial viability for the Internet.

For all the noise it is generating, push is not a
particularly riotous concept. It simply allows information
providers to deliver data directly to an individual — that
is, to push it to her computer desktop or other electronic
device — rather than requiring that she type in a World Wide
Web or Internet address and “pull” the information from
the Net.

This is hardly revolutionary. E-mail and Internet news
groups have been providing this function, albeit with
less sophistication, for decades.

But Pointcast Inc., a leading push software company,
reportedly has rejected a purchase offer of nearly half
a billion dollars from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.,
believing it can get more money by taking the company to
the public in a stock offering.

Meanwhile, the March cover of Wired magazine bellows,
“PUSH! Kiss your Web browser goodbye … And good
riddance.” Elsewhere, Jesse Berst, the editorial
director for the Ziff-Davis online service Anchor Desk,
recently wrote an article about push technology that
began, “Order a headstone: The browser died on
Wednesday.”

And you know a technology has reached the promised land
when Microsoft Corp. stakes its claim. Earlier this
month the company announced the formation of a new
consortium to set the technical standard for a push
technology it calls the “channel definition format,” or
CDF.

Goodness, folks! Open a window and get some fresh air.
Time for a clear-headed look at the reality of push
technology.

First, push technology as sold today does seem to fit
the needs of large, established media companies. It
addresses their biggest online problem: that on the Web,
every other information provider — giant or teeny,
professional or amateur — is just as accessible as they
are.

This is a problem when what people mostly do with their
Web browsers is, well, browse — skipping from one site
to the next, often never to return. Big publishers have
great difficulty duplicating their time-honored business
model, which is based on charging advertisers to reach a
measurable universe of subscribers. In order to set fees
for ads, they need to provide advertisers with some
certainty of how many viewers will actually see them.

Thus push technology allows media companies to believe
they’ve returned to more familiar turf, where they can
once again call their customers “subscribers” instead of
counting them as mere “hits” on a Web page.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with the approach the
big media companies are taking. In fact, if they are
smart, they will consider push as a way to take
advantage of the fabulous cost savings in distributing
their print products directly to subscribers online –
subscribers who pay for the paper, the printer and the
network connections.

But this is a different picture from the one being
painted by the editors of Wired, for example, an
organization that is betting heavily on push technology to
shove its online service, HotWired, toward profitability.

Wired’s March cover story suggests that “relief from
boredom” will drive the technology into the mainstream:
“Push media will penetrate environments that have, in
the past, been media-free — work, school, church, the
solitude of a country walk … push media are already
colonizing the world’s last quiet nooks and crannies.”

And this is supposed to be desirable? As Daffy Duck so
eloquently puts it, “Shoot me now!”

Only three types of people really want information
shoved into their faces 24 hours a day: sports,
stock-market and news fiends (which explains the media
madness about push).

The rest of the world is not populated with people who
need to know it now — whatever “it” is. Some people not
only prefer, but demand, the kind of control over
information flow that browsers provide. We are already
overwhelmed with information, whether we are connected
to the Internet or not. Shoving it down our throats does
not increase our capacity for information. If anything,
it engages our gag reflexes.

In fact, if every Web site starts pushing information to
its customers, a reflexive reaction cannot be far
behind.

In the novelty phase of push, Net-heads will indeed sign
up to have online publications and Web sites pushed to
them free, as the 1 million or so Pointcast
“subscribers” have done so far.

But it seems inevitable: When their mailboxes or
desktops or pagers start honking and wheezing with
incessant announcements of new data — or, ponder this,
when the junk-mail pushers get hold of them — they will
unsubscribe in a rush of adrenal terror.

Or, as so many Pointcast subscribers claim to do today,
they will simply turn it off. Which, one might argue,
defeats the purpose.

The central paradox of the information age is that we
are building an economy upon information technology that
makes it exponentially easier to create and distribute
data than at any time in history. Yet the sheer volume
of information available today is already beyond what
any human being can comprehend.

The old laws of supply and demand are crumbling under
the weight of all those bits. Push does not solve this
most fundamental problem; in fact, it does not even
begin to address it. Perhaps before we allow the
hypesters to declare push as the redemption of the
Internet, we should ask them from what we are being
saved.

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company