Decline of Internet a giant step for mankind

A friend stuck on the notion of old-fashioned family bonding over a board game always includes one in the Christmas booty. This year she turned up with "How to be a dot.com Billionaire!"

There were near-riots during charades and the Scrabble triggered some theatrics, but no one showed a titter of interest in exploring how to be a dot.com billionaire. (And believe me, it's not that we have any principled objection to a bit of obscene wealth.)

Clearly a message of some kind had been ingested, even in a household not wedded to the business pages. Yep, dot.com lunacy is dead - consigned with other lemming rushes such as Dutch tulip fever and the biotech boom to an economics footnote.

To recap. In just nine months, 60 of the largest Internet companies have seen their share prices plunge by 90 per cent. Even the superstar Yahoo! has had 86 per cent wiped off its market value.

Last Tuesday shares in Letsbuyit.com (set up to pool consumers' buying power, an idea surely made for the web) slumped almost 70 per cent after its market suspension.

Of the 17 dot.com companies which bought advertising spots last year for America's sporting showpiece, the Super Bowl, seven are already out of business. Just three are back to buy space this year.

Even the term "dot.com" has become a pain in the butt for Americans. It featured this week (along with "chad", "dude" and "have a good one") in the 26th Annual Banished Word List published by Lake Superior State University.

Should we be pleased? To see a craze marketed as something godlike, something to which the entire world was required to submit in awe or wither in its absence, brought to its knees?

To see that monstrously over-sold technology smashed open and its fairly humdrum components shrunken to actual size?

To see Wall Street's brokerage stock gurus - whose relentless, self-serving optimism brought them riches and stardom while costing investors billions in losses - finally being rumbled?

Should we be pleased? Ecstatic more like.

And how have the rest of us, the intended fodder, fared in this bonfire of the vanities? Well, it seems that for notcompletemorons.com, the novelty began to wear thin some time ago. Recent research carried out for a multinational project sponsored by the British Economic and Social Research Council suggests that teenagers are using the Net less than before and that - surprise, surprise - online shopping will never take the place of old-fashioned retail therapy.

In the United States, almost 28 million people have abandoned the Internet; they got bored, or frustrated by the amount of advertising, or just didn't bother to pay for access after university.

It's a maturing process. Ours is a fairly typical family. We value technology; I remember having to drive nearly 20 miles to deliver articles by hand. One of us even manages a commercial website. We've used the Net for, among other things, buying airline tickets (no problem); choosing and booking a holiday destination (catastrophic); downloading ring tones on mobile phones (better to compose your own); e-mails (a boon for some, one of the top 10 stresses of modern working life for many); teenage chat-rooms (where, as Sugar magazine warns its teenage readers, your 15-year-old "soul mate" could really be a 41-year-old paedophile).

For us, as the mists of hype and fear have receded, the Web has been revealing itself for what it is:

a) as a means of electronic communication, littered with poor advertising sites;

b) as a terrific research tool - if often out-of-date, infuriatingly slow, dangerous ("cyberquacks" peddling health remedies online) and plain wrong (like the reputable site which said a childhood cancer had a 95 per cent mortality rate when in fact, the survival rate is 75 per cent);

c) as a purveyor of hard porn poised to strike when least expected. NB: Want to research offbeat religions for a school project? Cults.com is not what you need.

So how have we allowed ourselves - from governments down - to be so bullied and intimidated by these masters of illusion? Haven't we, of all people, seen enough to know that, though the absence of a family computer will hardly dent the quality of life, a shortage of nurses, say, could shatter it? Or carers, or teachers, or bus drivers, or gardai, or local shopkeepers, or builders, or hairdressers . . .

Haven't we learned that the richer we become, the more we need what only human beings can provide - human contact and human voices, uniquely talented individuals with their personal skills?

This is not some bleeding-heart eulogy to the wonders of average folk; it's a hard commercial lesson. This is the future of work. It's the lesson that, in their virtual reality, the young dot.commers failed to grasp. It's the lesson that their elders with more life experience should have taught them - had those same elders not been silenced instead by their own fear, greed and ageism.

Medb Ruane is on leave