A new Super Bowl commercial features a segment from The Today Show in 1994 in which Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel are perplexed and confused by the Internet. It’s funny to watch as they struggle just to grasp the concept of the Internet. They can’t even make sense of the now ubiquitous “@” or properly read a URL.
Watching the ad is a pleasant and nostalgic reminder of how much our world has changed in the last 20 years. And it’s one of many such videos you can find on YouTube that poke fun of our naïve 90s selves. Speaking of YouTube, our history with social media is even younger than our history with the Internet. But just try to remember life without Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc. How did we ever live without them? Social media is so commonplace now that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t long ago most of us didn’t have a platform to express and share our ideas with the masses. The best we could do was perhaps send out a Christmas newsletter to everyone in our (physical) address books or write and submit a (physical) letter to our local newspaper and hope it got published in the opinion section. Now, in an instant, we can tweet, pin, share, or post anything we want for all the world to see. If we’re really lucky, our ideas can even go viral. The power to create, shape or be the news now belongs to everybody. So here’s the question? In 20 years, what will the Internet and social media look like? In 2035, will we make fun of ourselves for the way we obsessed about tweeting and pinning? It’s safe to say that answering these questions with any degree of accuracy is nearly impossible. In the 1950s, Disney tried to imagine the world as it would look like in the 1980s, and the vision wasn’t even close to reality. Still, it’s fun to imagine what social media may become in a decade or so. How long will Twitter and Pinterest continue to be megatrends? Will we laugh and shake our heads when we remember those silly, archaic things called Facebook and smart phones? Who knows? The point is, at any given moment, we are living in the most advanced age of humankind. We think that we know everything, but history tells us that we have much more to discover, and much that we will abandon for something better. Right now, we can’t imagine a life without smart phones, social media, and the Internet. But for all we know, in 20 years, reminiscing on a life with all of those things may make us laugh and shake our heads. In 2030, our children born this decade could ask us, “Hey Mom and Dad: Did cars really used to have tires? Did you actually have to use a little hand-held device to talk to someone?” Scary, right?
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