On 15 March 1985 symbolics. com registered the world’s very first ever dot com suffix. So? Well, it has been 25 years since, on Monday 15 March.
There are now 80-million odd such dot coms and counting. Plus millions of .orgs, .nets, .govs, etc. We know how much the internet and the World Wide Web (not to be confused with each other), have changed our lives.
On 15 March 1985 symbolics. com registered the world’s very first ever dot com suffix. So? Well, it has been 25 years since, on Monday 15 March.
There are now 80-million odd such dot coms and counting. Plus millions of .orgs, .nets, .govs, etc. We know how much the internet and the World Wide Web (not to be confused with each other), have changed our lives.
There is this thing called social networking, for one thing. If you’re not on Facebook, it’s Flickr, or Bebo, or Twitter.
You might also use YouTube and blog regularly. Heck, I often find it impossible to stop my eager-beaver students (not one was even alive 25 years ago) from multi-tasking between an in-class writing assignment, and their three or five simultaneous Facebook conversations. Incidentally, I have to wonder where they get all these “friends”.
I remember when I finally begrudgingly joined Facebook about a year ago, I was bombarded with 115 “friendship requests” on day one.
Some were from people I’d known for years, but many were men, women and children who’ve been peripheral to my entire adult life. Still others were strangers.
I’ve been an infrequent guest since. But this might do the trick for Facebook’s 600-million users today keep the relationship superficial, fleeting, and relentless.
Might explain the need to Facebook every five minutes. Not that it matters what I think. Information communication technologies (ICTs) are decidedly the future; and today, it’s the primary driver of middle-class lifestyles around the world.
You wake up, take a shower, brush your teeth, have your juice and cereal, and head to work. First order of business is checking your various e-mail accounts.
Then it’s your instant messaging (IM) Blog/Bebo pages. For Generation What Next?, it’s from bed-skip-shower-to Facebook. In more developed economies, shopping is now increasingly online (Amazon.com), airline, movie, and train tickets;school and university registration; banking; making a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment; a visa appointment; or getting eyeball time with your local representative.
Some countries in the global north have near universal broadband connection (which allows you to download movie-quality data off the internet at high speed).
A small nugget for your bar conversations: South Korea is the most wired nation on earth, closely followed by Finland.
As if we needed any more proof of ICT supremacy, the world’s second richest man, according to Forbes magazine, is Microsoft’s William H.
Gates, who answers to a short first name he shares with President Clinton. Indeed, if he had not donated some $30-billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates would be the world’s richest man by miles.
Oh, and what business is Carlos Slim, the richest man, in? Try telephones and ICTs in Mexico.Yet there is also a depressing underbelly to this ICT juggernaut.
Have our lives, for example, become so boring that the biggest hit on YouTube is a ‘song’ created entirely from iPhone ringtones? Why is sex.com still the most expensive site ever sold (for $14 million in 2006)? And why are “get over it!”
the first words from the 21st century geek when you complain about the often inane and shallow nature of most online networking. Is “get-over it” perhaps a secret religion the rest of us know nothing about? It is however, also quite true that ICTs have opened up a whole new world for newsmongers.
It’s up to us to bell the cat. We must. Otherwise it might all be like the Wizard of Oz – nothing there once you pull away the curtain. Save your letters to the editor on this one, you can IM me instead.
•Sim Kyazze is a technophile who retains a great respect for the printed
