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What people in 1900 thought 2000 would look like
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Paul
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Oct 18, 2015 03:28PM
ICYMI - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...
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I remember having to write essays at school in the late 1960s about what the world would be like in 2000.Looking back the big difference is that the world hasn't advanced as much as we assumed
Obviously we never predicted the internet but in real terms the internet hasn't made that much difference. It's merely allowed you to do things that you already could do, but a bit cheaper and easier
Come on, Jim! The impact of the internet has been immense. I know you like being provocative but you're stretching a point there ...The internet has changed how we work, shop, communicate. It has changed the shops in the High Street, the jobs that we do, how we interact with people. You may not notice is so much on the farm, but for everyone else the internet has been massive.
The biggest changes are the ones that we can't easily see. Between 1900 and the present day, the world's population has increased from 1 billion to 7 billion.
Sure, we aren't driving around in flying cars. But we are flying off to foreign holidays. And we have these little things called drones that are taking off (if you will forgive the pun).
All it's done Will, is do things faster. Yes it moved purchasing off the high street but that's hardly new. The Sears-Roebuck catalogue, complete with buy your own Thompson Submachinegun was doing that in the 1920s So actually all the internet is doing for shopping is allowing you to go back to the normal situation in rural American before the Second World War :-).
Indeed the high street in the UK seems to be going back to what my Mother described as a young woman going shopping with her mother. A mixture of meeting friends in tea-rooms, picking up a few odds and sods, and leaving orders with wholesalers to drop stuff off.
In fact I've been using my phone to go shopping since I first went into business. Admittedly I used it to talk to people and order stuff, rather than sending them a text (but we did have suppliers who liked orders by fax) .
Even as a journalist, yes it lets me do things faster BUT it's still the things I used to do. I can remember faxing stories through to editors. The big change for the journalist came with the telegraph, which meant you could get the story there the same day, not with email.
When you stop and think, the internet is about speed. After all I've always been able to share photographs with my friends. It just took a lot longer. The internet doesn't allow us to take photographs for the first time.
Sorry, but no. If you want to be pedantic about it, the only difference between a jumbo jet and a donkey is the amount of time it would take each to take you from New York to Los Angeles. That doesn't mean that the jumbo jet was not a significant invention.Or the only difference between a computer and a cave painting is that the computer has more pictures of cats. Probably.
Or the only difference between the ancient city of Ur and modern day New York is that Ur had more edible street food. Again, probably.
Sometimes the quantum of the difference between two things is so great that we can't simply say "the only difference is speed".
The Seers Roebuck catalogue didn't make HMV go bust. And Woolworths. And Blockbusters. It didn't remodel the publishing industry.
One little experiment. I once found a post-it note on my desk with a telephone number written on it. I couldn't for the life of me remember what the number was for. So I googled it, and no sooner had I hit enter than the internet told me who the number belonged to.
Sure, you could just about do that in the days of yellow pages. But it would have taken so long trying to comb through the telephone directory as to be virtually impossible.
And let's not forget the scientific advances that the internet has made possible. Would we have been able to map the human genome without scientists sharing their work on the internet?
It's like a whole nother world. We would probably be burned at the stake...a couple hundred years ago.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1fSUos8...
I read a short SF story long ago that has stuck with me ever since. In it, a time traveler from the late 1800's goes to 1950 and then returns. He writes a science fiction story based on what he saw, but cannot sell it anywhere.Finally, he tracks down an editor who tells him that he had great imagination in what he wrote, but he made one glaring error. "What's that?" the time traveler said.
"Well, there are people alive in 1950 who are alive now, and yet none of them are amazed by all the marvels."
I've told that story to my son , and I think about all the things we have now vs. when I was a kid in the 50's and 60's.
Will wrote: "One little experiment. I once found a post-it note on my desk with a telephone number written on it. I couldn't for the life of me remember what the number was for. So I googled it, and no sooner had I hit enter than the internet told me who the number belonged to..."Actually being a freelance journalist I used to have a CD with all the phone numbers in the telephone book on it :-)
But what I'm trying to point out to people that the internet isn't something utterly fabulous, it's just joining up stuff so it can happen faster.
Perhaps its biggest effect might actually be that it allows things to be done by people with no training.
Twenty five years ago I could have told you the phone number, but you couldn't find it.
Fifty years ago I could still have got you the phone number, but by an entirely different technique, but you didn't know it (and back then neither did I until I talked to an old journalist who told me how they used to do it :-) )
The thing perhaps isn't that the internet allows mail order sales, it's that through ebay or Amazon shops it allows everybody to do mail order sales.
No, we are not talking about finding a telephone number. We are talking about finding a person if all you know is their telephone number. That is the opposite of a telephone directory. And that level of search is available to every person with tools readily to hand and with no need for training.Sorry, Jim, but you are almost certainly in a minority of one with this one.
Think of it this way. The invention of oral language meant that one human could pass information to another human. This meant that we could teach, and that meant that each generation could know a little more than the generation that preceded it.
The invention of a written language meant that one human could pass information to many people, even long after the originator of the message had died.
The invention of telegraphy, radio and television meant that one person could pass information instantly to many people at once and across large distances.
The invention of the internet meant that one person can access information from many sources, whenever they want it, and regardless of location. And that changes the way we live, the jobs that we do, how we shop, how we learn. It is rapidly increasing scientific knowledge as scientists can compare and collate research findings simultaneously from all around thew world.
The internet really is a massive game changer. Saying that it does nothing except make things faster is a long way from the truth. If you think that the internet is only about mail order sales, you really do need to stay in more.
Will wrote: "No, we are not talking about finding a telephone number. We are talking about finding a person if all you know is their telephone number. That is the opposite of a telephone directory. And that lev..."you misunderstand me Will, the CD allowed you to put the number in and search for that number
And the CD was invented in the 1980s as part of the same technology that gives us the internet. That particular CD was something that you had to buy separately from your computer and, I imagine, wasn't cheap. The CD could only do one thing - provide information about phone numbers. And you needed to have a computer to use it. On the other hand, anyone with a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone can access the same information (and much much more) instantly and for free.
If we tried to replicate the internet with non-internet technology we would need a library with several million books in it, a music collection spanning millions of CDs, a movie collection of just about every movie ever made. And I don't have the first clue how we would replicate Goodreads or Google Earth. Or Tinder. Or Ubr.
We are both self-published authors - something that was much harder to do before the internet. We can and do have conversations with our readers all around the world. I work from home - something I couldn't do in my line of work without the internet.
I finally realized the 'future' had arrived when I saw the "Word Lens" app a few years ago that lets your smartphone translate signs, menus, etc. on the fly. [It appears that it has been now subsumed into Google Translate]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQ...
Well, considering events of the past two decades, as well as the fact that the term "genome" wasn't even created until 1920, I bet a great deal of what has happened in, around, and as a result of the field of genetics was never imagined even in Mendel's wildest dreams.
What I was driving at was that the changes the internet has made are more social than inventive. The speed of things mean you can work at home.
Just about every piece of technology that you have bought in the last ten years is the result of the pooling of research via the internet. The computer than you are using to communicate right now was produced by dozens of teams collaborating via the web.Take an operating like Windows 10 or IOS 9 and try to imagine how they would have been produced without the internet.
If we could go back in time and uninvent the internet, what we would find would be that the pace of technological change would be vastly reduced. We would not have a fraction of the gadgets and products that we take for granted.
This is why we are currently seeing an exponential growth in technology and research. The pooling of data means that we don't need to keep reinventing the wheel.
And, yes, apart from the speed there is very little that a computer can't do that we couldn't also do with pen and paper and a stamp. But the speed is so vastly increased that we can do things that we could not feasibly do without the internet.
Last night I wrote a report which included extracts from several other source documents. I was able to find these source documents and copy them via the internet - both the web and emails. In theory, I could have written the same paper without the internet. I would have had to write to the authors of the source documents and ask them to send them to me. There would have been a delay while my letter arrived, they read it, photocopied the relevant extracts and then wrote back to me. That's all theoretically possible but it would have taken weeks.
And it relied on me knowing which source documents I wanted, and for the authors to be willing to share them with me.
My client needed the report within a matter of hours, not weeks. I was able to complete the job with today's technology. I could not have done it without the internet.
But you've just said, the important thing was about time.The client wanted it immediately.But I can remember doing something similar, digging for the sources which existed in hard copy, going through interlibrary loan and that sort of thing.
Nothing you did would have been impossible, it would just have taken an awful lot longer. It would have been an ongoing project taking months if not years
Operating systems are interesting. Firstly without an internet they'd be a lot slimmer with a lot less features because there was no internet to use them on.
But it's what I was saying, the internet does things faster, cheaper and easier, but they're things that we could do if we'd ever wanted to, but they might have taken years rather than days. Scientists collaborated, shared data, went to meetings and borrowed ideas of each other long before there was an internet. The internet was invented largely to speed up the process that was already happening and that it's done.
But there again it has to be faster, cheaper and easier because of the downside. Because government bodies think they can analyse data, they demand data to analyse. Because they think everybody has fast broadband, they have systems which need fast broadband to work. So at times the internet becomes a maw into which you have to waste time shovelling data. A century ago in this country they didn't even bother recording what firearms people owned because the paperwork would have taken up too much staff time
It was a job that could not have been done without the internet. The speed made it possible. It's the difference between flying to the Bahamas for your holidays or going there by rowing boat. Sure, you can get there by rowing boat but the time taken would make it unfeasible.Yes scientists collaborated before the internet. Very slowly. It would take weeks or months for research findings to be shared around the world and then only at a high level. The raw data would be too big to publish.
And, no, Governments don't analyse data because they can. They do it because it achieves something. I have been involved in many exercises for the Government or local authorities which capture large amounts of data. Because collecting data costs money, we have never once done it just because we wanted to fill up fast broadband.
Let's try a little experiment. Imagine jumping in your car and driving to the nearest supermarket to buy some beer. Unless you are in something like a 1960s MGB, your car is the product of research that was only made possible by the internet. The traffic lights that you pass are controlled and fine-tuned by traffic data distributed on the internet. The supermarket shelves are filled by stock management computers working on the internet. The product that you buy will involve several processes connected to the internet. And you will probably pay with a credit card via an internet connection to check that you have enough money.
And we're using the internet to talk about it.
But that's what I'm saying, people drove to buy beer a century ago, (and the beer was probably better ;-) )They paid for it.
There's nothing new, just speed
Traffic lights, cars and beer were invented before the internet and can run without it, but they can potentially run faster with it
But the difference in speed is enough to make something either viable or not viable. There is no way that I could take a holiday in the Bahamas if jumbo jets didn't exist. Sure the only difference between a jumbo jet and a rowing boat is speed, but that extra speed makes all the difference about whether the journey is feasible or not.Can traffic lights and supermarkets work without the internet only more slowly? Well, not really. We are getting to the point where these systems could not function without the internet in the same way that our current population levels could not function without modern farming methods.
Saying "it's only speed" is missing the point because that speed is what makes something possible or not.
You might as well say that books aren't an important invention because they are the same as cave paintings, but with more pages.
Jim,I have to go back to your first comment: "Obviously we never predicted the internet but in real terms the internet hasn't made that much difference. It's merely allowed you to do things that you already could do, but a bit cheaper and easier."
As a famous reply goes, "Of what use is a newborn baby?"
