The Internet Has Arrived

There is much to say about the Internet. We can glorify it, we can vilify it; but the bottom line is that it makes each and every one of us more empowered. “Why aren’t we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real,” wrote Kevin Kelly.

I feel like my Grandfather complaining about the youth today, but I am going to do it. I feel a lack of appreciation for the web. The Internet is expression, entertainment, community, knowledge and connectivity at our fingertips. I can only imagine my sentiment of ingrate users growing with passing generations. Kids today grow up with the convenient ease of its speed, information and search functionality; there will be a lot less hauling of 10lb encyclopedias. Kids today will never get to hear the beautiful sound of a modem dialing up; “a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo,” according to Dave Barry. Companies like Netscape, Compuserve and America Online will be unrecognized. The invention of the web is perhaps the greatest innovation of my lifetime, and I feel we owe it a few more kudos.

In 1945, American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote, “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Was he the oracle to our matrix? Bush wanted to take on the overwhelming task of making all of human knowledge more accessible. With great foresight, and perhaps prophetic talent, Bush envisioned hypertext, and thus became a pioneer of the World Wide Web.

Bush recognized humanity’s increased ability to keep an improved record with developments in photography, printing, film and other mediums. He saw potential for authentic and accurate copies of information and even foresaw the ability to compress these, “The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.” Bush wanted a better way to augment human understanding and cognition, a few decades later his vision become a reality.

Kevin Kelly is a great writer. Interested in the early history of the web? Take a second, and read the article “We are the Web” from Wired magazine.

Ok, I’m going to skip a lot of the history lesson because it is available all over the web, ironic isn’t it? I want to talk about what really surprised the hell out of web pioneers: the prevalence of user made content. Believe it or not at one point there was fundamental concern that web content would be too expensive to procure and thus the net would be lacking information. These early web masterminds underestimated human desire to make and create contributions, for interaction, participation, and for options--- and this is what has turned into “the main event.” The scope of the web today is hard to believe. The culture is participatory: we are sharing recipes, updating Wikipedia, commenting on the news, and posting and reading blogs. Kelly is right, we are the web.

Social media is just one example of our participatory environment but it is a significant shift in our culture. Watch this video.

Today, from your laptop, desktop, game system, tablet or handheld device, you can get: a an enormous variety of music and video, a constantly updated encyclopedia, the weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, IRS forms, road maps with driving directions, ticking stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, game scores, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives of major newspapers and magazines - all wrapped up in a searchable platform that really works. Information is available to us like never before.

What will come from the explosion of information, increased technical ability and our desire to share? This is the question of the future. We will certainly get more “lol cats” Clay Shirky suggests in his Ted Talk, “How cognitive surplus will change the world.” But Shirky is also hoping for something more, something bigger than “lol cats.”

Shirky talks about Ushahidi, a website that launched in 2008 as a form of crisis mapping in Kenya. The tool offered Eastern Africans information and the ability to share information about what was going on around them in the shade of their government’s media blackout. This platform embodies the idea of cognitive surplus, of shared information meant to help one another, of open source information made up of the world’s free time and talents. Man, it is truly a beautiful thing. I think we should all be amazed and inspired by idea of “design for generosity.” The Internet has given us an enormous opportunity to create tools and spaces that offer civic value, change society and build a more cooperative world. It’s up to us to harness the power for more than “lol cats.”

I do not deny that there are problems with Internet. We can talk about things like privacy, control and the loss of “common ground” sometime soon. But there is only one era in history when the Internet is born. You and I have are alive at this moment. I don’t know about you, but I find it exciting.