How the Internet is Changing the World

OK. I’m indulging myself here... so, sorry if it’s boring. These are just some ideas, so skip this post if you’re looking for a quick hit of Irish net data.

Take yourselves back, 2300 odd years and Alexander's conquests have expanded the size of the known world from Europe east to India, Afghanistan and beyond. New trade routes, language, communication and the opening of the library at Babylon are the result. 2000 years and the Roman’s are building roads all over their Empire, and walls and aqueducts - paths for language, culture, post and armies to travel upon. 1700 odd years and Emperor Constantine’s coinage has the invincible sun on one side and the Christian holy labrum on the other.... (perhaps the first mobile marketing campaign) bringing together diverse peoples behind common symbols. The Renaissance and the Europeans re-discover the classical age after the desert of the dark ages, and printing begins. The 20th century and things speed up apace. Trains, planes and automobiles combine with post, telephone, Marconi’s radio and TV... all shrinking the world. And then comes the net.

The net may be more important to the growth, development and perpetuation of human civilization than all of the other changes mentioned combined. I’ll give five reasons, though there will be others...

1. Global communication of ideas, instantaneously... across media. No need for roads, or tickets, post or paper... and (almost) everyone can use the net. The democratic idea generation and dissemination much feared after Gutenberg almost 600 years earlier, has finally arrived
2. Central publishing and self publishing makes social and political control and ownership of ideas and knowledge almost impossible. Even powerful knowledge like how to make a neuclear weapon requires merely access to Google. Government propoganda has never been so difficult and may indeed become largely obsolete
   
3. Mobile internet makes idea generation and dissemination instantaneous and moves them from the post office to the pocket. 
   
4. Learning and idea generation speeds up by perhaps a factorial of 10, every six months. Wikipedia is 7 years old, has 10 million articles (at least) and it’s updated every day by thousands of authors. Brittanica takes a lifetime to write and the paper edition at least is a little bit out of date even before it goes to print. There’s a quality difference, but still...
   
5. Internet protocol takes the best from all the media that have gone before, and centralizes them seamlessly. The medium isn’t the message, and neither is the format. The message is the message and anyone can produce one. Listen, read, see online or on your mobile... regardless of whether the initial content producer worked for a TV station, radio, newspaper or was a blogger. And then readers can comment on the message for all the other consumers of the message and the comment... a whole new broadcast message. And with web 2.0 this is only the beginning...
   

The net is the warp drive for human exploration, idea generation and communication, where TV was merely a pulse. Blogs carry the Gutenberg revolution to its extreme, while mobiles democratize the moving images of TV, and turns them into moving images on the move generated by the mover. Need to see pictures from Mars? Need results from recent medical trials? Need to say I love you to someone on the other side of the planet? Need to secretly broadcast a war in some far off corner? Need to develop a new idea with experts scattered hither and yon? Need a pizza? Enter the net. And anyone can do these things all by themselves.

I really think we live in incredible times and we take them for granted because we’ve got too used to amazing changes in the way we live, how we learn, how we talk to each other and how we listen. We suffer from Internet exhaustion as it’s too difficult to keep bothering to pluck up the energy and see the implications of the newest gadget. The iPhone is the latest... but there’s another gadget along every six months. And most of us are just too busy with the buzz of everyday life to sit down and play with these machines and see what their very existence implies. But it is truly awesome, inspiring and humbling stuff and once in a while I think it’s just good to sit back and soak up some scale.