Often, it is too easy to look around at the world and think that nothing is changing, that even with the advances in technology that we see, things are generally staying the same. But they aren't. The world is constantly in flux, it's just that often, changes creep up on us.
When I was a child, cell phones were rare. Not unheard of, but not ubiquitous, either. Getting a cell phone for high school was a big deal. Now everyone has one. Quick, try to think of how your life would be if you got lost while driving and couldn't call a friend for directions (or for some people, if you couldn't pull up Google Maps on your phone). Google Maps, for that matter. Mapquest and the like have given us the ability to ignore maps altogether and simply tell the computer to get us from point A to point B. I don't remember having that as a child.
The internet as a whole is quite astounding. I know that I would have lost contact with all my amazing friends from high school without Facebook. I'm bad at letters and phone calls and even emails, but Facebook is just so easy. Way back when, and I'm talking 10 years ago, whole families shared email addresses. Now I'm not part of the real world right now (yay college!), but I feel like that's changed as well.
Some of us remember actually having to go to the library to do any kind of research. Back in my childhood, internet access was limited, and what we could get was sometimes blocked by dial-up anyway. Now, the information of the world is at our fingertips. Heck, even I have designed a website for a class. And in another one of those airplane/ice-cube type situations I mentioned yesterday, I just realized that I'm being astonished at the power of the internet to let people design their own internet and broadcast their own information while writing my own blog.
Blogging! Vlogging! Allie Brosh, Charlie McDonnell, Alex Day, BriTANick, The Nostalgia Critic, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation, Barats and Bereta, Justin Bieber, and many, many others are all people who would likely have remained undiscovered and unheard without the internet. Now, they get to share their awesomeness with the world, and we get to benefit from it. The internet is a place where the people of the world get to decide what is seen and what is popular. Anyone can try, and with a lot of luck, they can find their place and their online community. People who have gotten their start on LiveJournal have even published their own great books. It's a new and amazing world out there.
On a related note, the final thing I want to discuss is YouTube and video-sharing sites. I didn't discover YouTube until the middle of my junior year of high school, but now I can't really imagine life without it. Want to know what a politician said years ago? YouTube it. Want to watch and rewatch a favorite clip from a favorite show? YouTube it. Want to see an awesome hybridization of Kirby and Snoop Dogg? YouTube it.
There's a lot going on out there and it's all at our fingertips. Is the internet perfect? No. But it is changing the world, and faster than we realize. With our cellphones and our internet (and our increasingly internet-capable cell phones) we are moving forward. Maybe it will turn out in the end that the catalyst for world peace is finding that everybody thinks that videos of kittens are adorable.
I've thought about this a lot too. The Internet in its entirety has brought an incredible amount of societal chance since the early 90's, but thinking of it as a singular institution doesn't even do justice to the incredibly rapid pace of technological growth. Today's internet has almost nothing in common with the internet from 10 years ago, and things were pretty different even 5 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's fascinating trying to guess how long some sites and products have been around for, then looking up the actual date. What was available exactly five years ago in 2005? YouTube was only a couple months old and no one had heard of it. Facebook was restricted to college students and wasn't a significant force on the internet. Gmail was invitation-only and would stay that way for another couple years. 2005 feels "recent" to me, but I still can't imagine the internet without these.
Look back another 5 years to 2000 and things get even more ridiculous. Google did nothing but search, and they weren't even the biggest search engine. The company wouldn't go public for another 4 years. Wikipedia didn't exist. Firefox wouldn't arrive for a few more years; Internet Explorer was widely considered the best browser out there, though Netscape still had its users. I know I still spent all my time online then, but I have no idea what I was doing.
It's strange that at any given time it feels like things aren't changing that much, but you don't have to look back more than a couple of years to see that things have gotten significantly different.
tl;dr: technology is cooooool