Today (at least according to mozilla.org) marks the 10,000th day of the World Wide Web (does anyone even call the Internet by that name anymore??). I’m not certain what significance that holds (other than ain’t none of us getting any younger), but it does make me think of the progress that’s be made possible over the past 27.4 years. The easy availability and exchange of information have made the world a much smaller (if not less contentious) place. Communication is easier, faster, and more meaningful. News travels at the speed of light. The difference in overseas travel alone in the 30 years from my first international experience is like night and day. During my first three weeks in Kosovo in 1994, I couldn’t get a phone call, letter, or fax (remember those?) into or out of the country. Now email is virtually universal and Internet access is taken for granted.
We now live in an age in which the entire sum total of human knowledge and experience is at our fingertips. Our computers, tablets, and smartphones allow us to access a depth and breadth of information that seemed unimaginable less than two generations ago. A few years ago, I used Skype to speak with a woman in her living room in Kyrenia, Cyprus. It’s a common enough occurrence these days, but I still marvel at being able to speak with someone nine time zones away as if they were sitting across my kitchen table from me. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but my grandmother had a hand-crank telephone that was hooked up to a party line in rural northern Minnesota. I first started using the Internet for work back when dial-up connections ran at the then seemingly blazing speed of 1200 baud. Now things happen almost instantaneously, and wi-fi access has come to be viewed as a basic human right…and for very good reason. In an age when information is power, lacking access to information means being powerless.
I’m not certain what the next 10,000 days will hold for humanity, but if it’s anything like the first, our world will be unrecognizable to anyone using today as a reference. I can only hope that it will help us create a more peaceful and harmonious world.
