Tag Archives: internet and society

Human Being 4.0: The Web Edition

For better or worse, whether in the context of a “global village” or a “brave new world”, the Internet has given many of us a larger presence in the world that may well be redefining what it means to be human. If we have email addresses, contributions to on-line listservs and forums, social networking pages, blogs, websites and other such virtual edifices, our availability to be viewed, reviewed, and connected with is a quantum leap beyond the pre-web days when most of us just had a phone number and a street address. And as we continue to live our lives we have an ever-growing artifact trail accessible to anyone with a browser, much of it perhaps beyond our control and not necessarily what we would choose to share with strangers or maybe even friends and family. This virtual edifice of artifacts, words and pictures of ourselves captured as binary information in electronic data repositories, that continues even past our death.

Continue reading →

Thoughts on the Internet

I am trying to come to grips with this profound new institution which seems likely to be as transforming for society in the 21st Century as movable type was in the 16th. It struck me just now that no institution in our contemporary society has been more significant in my own development over the past ten years than this many-ways-connected network of computer servers originally designed to be a communication channel most likely to survive a nuclear war. In fact, I think it has played this primary developmental role for my partner Sally and our now young-adult kids as well, and I suspect that it has quickly established itself as a critical tool of human evolution.

Continue reading →