A defining characteristic of humanity is our skill and penchant for creating and using tools. From a sharpened shard of obsidian to a central processing unit composed of hundreds of millions of transistors, we are continually trying to improve ourselves and our society through technological advancement. In many ways we have arguably been successful, but the process is not without danger. The age of nuclear power brought the hydrogen bomb and space exploration yielded ICBMs — the combined power of which certainly brought humanity closer to the brink of annihilation than ever before. Fortunately not all such marriages produce similarly undesirable offspring. Perhaps the crowning achievement of modern human engineering — a culmination of hundreds or perhaps thousands of preceding innovations — is the child of the personal computer and digital communications: the Internet (that is the Internet, not an internet). It is, according to almost any technological or sociological measure, the most complex, dynamic, interconnected, and immense construct devised and implemented by mankind.
It is therefore expected, perhaps, that a significant portion of the interconnected growth of both the hardware and the wetware (a convenient, if slightly uncouth term for people using the technology) has been organic in nature. Aside from the most fundamental protocols and interconnects of the Internet, the direction and growth of the technology has been driven in an evolutionary fashion: through spurts of success and cullings of failure. Ideas and implementations which are epitomes of pragmatism and logic are rejected while frivolous nonsensicals thrive. It is this aspect of the Internet which makes attempting to divine the future both impossible and immensely profitable.
However, as important and fascinating as such development and technology is, over the last several years the primary focus of attention has shifted away from this aspect of the Internet and been directed instead onto the way the network is actually being used. Humanity has created for itself an immensely powerful tool of unprecedented capability and scope, and even today, some 10 or 15 years after its inception, we are still trying to figure out exactly what it is we have created. At the same time the tool appears to have taken on a life of its own — growing and expanding faster than we can understand such changes. One thing is certain: this tool has already fundamentally influenced human society more than any other and as the number of people using the Internet increases and the number of connections between users skyrockets this influence will only get larger. Once again society has been thrown in the transmogrifier; with some luck what emerges will be an improvement and not a monster.
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