The last three days I've been thinking, while surfing the Web to get the war news, that in 1991 during the last Gulf War we didn't have this luxury. The Internet as we now know it really didn't exist.
I look around at all these websites: eager, enthusiastic, good writers, many well-informed with great insights about what's going on, all sharing their impressions and thoughts. This is unbelievable. Who would have thought people all around the world would be able to communicate with each other with such ease, basically instantaneously? And it's either free or incredibly inexpensive to do so!
This is the defining cultural phenomenon of the twenty-first century. The Internet existed prior to 2000, yes, but it wasn't being used like this. No global event will ever be quite the same, as our ability to analyze and comment on them grows. I'm not trying to sound pompous here, but I think this is not so different in importance from the invention of the printing press in terms of improving communication.
posted by Dr. Alice at #
