Boggles the Mind

[b_hallward]

"If you want to realize just how amazing the level of progress has been with the internet, realize this: it was just 20 years ago, today, that Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web." -- TechDirt

Berners-Lee's proposal called for four software engineers and a programmer. From that to this.

Comments

[p_zeitgeist]

I know. I often wonder whether the sheer pace of change in availability of connection and information has made a change in the way we experience time and the internal narrative of our individual lives: I know that I can remember a time when we didn't have all this, and simultaneously I think back on it as I think back on books I have read, or histories I've thought through enough to try to imagine as living worlds. My own memories might as well be stories told by a great-great-grandmother, and then vividly (but partially, and inaccurately) imagined in the way of childhood.

And I wonder, has it ever been like this before for people? I always find it difficult to believe that there's really anything new in human experience, but this is one place I don't dismiss the possibility out of hand.

[b_hallward]

If you consider technology in general* then perhaps the Meiji period (in which one could have been born in an 18th century-like feudal era and died in the 1920s) would have been more shocking to any sort of stable internal narrative. But what may be unique is that multitasking/hypertext environments are changing our brains, as the OMG everyone must read novels!! people like to point out; this technology is widely available to a population; and it's growing so, so fast. It's possible we just haven't hit the stabilization point yet, but somehow I don't think it's going to be that simple.

* And, yes, I'm one of those people that can view almost anything as a technology, but even keeping to a more normal scope...

[lady_ganesh]

How things change.

[b_hallward]

Fun with exponential change!

[wordsofastory]

That is amazing. And one can know that, and still it doesn't seem quite real...

[kessie]

Every so often, I contemplate the people I've met and the cards and presents I've received from online friends, and how when I was a kid there was no inkling that one day I'd know so many people in different countries. Despite the drawbacks, the internet is a wonderful thing. :)

[b_hallward]

Sorry! Life went nuts for a moment there.

Anything as powerful and transformative as the internet will have drawbacks, but I could not agree with you more. I feel so lucky to have met all these wonderful people that I would otherwise never had known because the mere accident of distance put hundreds or thousands of miles between us.