Did you feel that? Everything just changed...

Wow...

Did you feel that?

No? Then perhaps you weren't paying attention.

SARS... or fear of SARS (which is more likely) has combined with the digital revolution, to change everything. Mark this date: 5/22/2003, for it marks an important milestone in the evolution of society.

Our world has been changing rapidly over the past 110 years, but really, the change has just begun. Just as the coils of Tesla fundamentally changed society and culture in the early part of the previous century, the integrated circuit of Kilby is causing massive change into this century. It was a very simple device that Jack Kilby showed to a handful of co-workers gathered in TI's semiconductor lab more than 40 years ago -- only a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium. Little did this group know, but Kilby's invention, less than a square inch and wafer thin in size, called an integrated circuit, was about to revolutionize society more dramatically than Tesla's coils.

We've seen and have grown tied of the myriad buzz-words used to define our new age -- the "information age", the "wired culture", the "Internet revolution", "media convergence", etc. -- but these simplistic descriptions miss this important point in history that started it all, the invention of the integrated circuit. As a result, now one core technology is underneath our communications, purchasing, monetary systems, and information storage. Digital technology touches everything.

And now, the Digital Revolution has provided the alternative that the fearful need to avoid human contact. In China, Internet use has nearly doubled since the beginning of the SARS problem (and a doubling of China's Internet use is a very bid thin indeed). And online commerce there has risen by a staggering 60 percent, the largest single-year jump in online commerce anytime, anywhere by at lest threefold.

Is this the beginning of a society similar to Isaac Asimov's prophetic novel, "The Naked Sun"? For those unfamiliar with the story, the planet Solaria is populated by humans who never actually encounter each other because of a deep cultural fear of physical contact. A complex planet-wide network provides plenty of virtual interaction. The increasing complexity of digital technologies, and its pervasiveness across all aspects of our lives, provides access to services and people that all but eliminate the need to leave the home.

Where do we go from here?

-reference story-

I'm sure amazon is happy...i wonder if we'll get some chinese users,not likely tho

Interesting post William..........

Thanks!!!

So , who is in control here???

Fear ....................now what does one have to fear???

thought we already had chinese users?

That's a great book William, I've read all of Asimov's stuff. He's a great writer. The idea is one of the things I am most afraid of. In the book the population is stablised at a certain level, the inhabitants all live in mansions and human contact, including sexual, provokes repulsion. A new child is 'made' by genetic scientists only when an inhabitant dies. I may be mixing two stories together here, haven't read that one for a while, but the implications are the same. I can easily see us get to the state in which human contact becomes the unusal means of contact, rather than the usual. Can't see it going as far as the book but it's still a very depressing thought.

Chinese users, yeah, i'm aware of that...But isnt chinese internet strictly controlled through an intranet type structure.
I remember the old stories of "internet crackdowns" where police would bust internet cafe's and arrest people.

aren't both Estragon and Alien from China?

Since when has that ever been different.

All of our basic instincts are driven by fear.
Fear of death.
Fear of starvation.
Fear of darkness.
Fear of cold.
Fear of sickness.
Fear of lonliness.
etc.

You are quite right!
But this time it is different Fear............
There is Fear of anyone that seems to resemble a terrorist!
There is Fear of catching some deadly virus.......which i believe there are many others , but no one knows as yet........
There is Fear of who your talkin to might really be???
There is Fear in the air...............I can feel it .........coming in the air tonight.........sorry........Phill Collins......great song!

No really..........Fear is not new, but it is all around us even more so after many things happening too close to each other to ignore.......

But fear only one................

Estragon is in China but he's not Chinese (He's a Brit I believe.) Alien is a Kiwi, New Zealander.

Estragon is indeed one of Her Majesty's subjects and is currently in the PRC.
Yes, the Chinese internet is strictly controlled -but in practice it's not strictly enforced: e.g. you can't easily get the BBC online but you get the World Service clear as a bell and various "caching" tricks help.
Annotingly, they often forget to "unban".
Still, I doubt if on balance they do much worse than commercial pressure does in the US - AOL, Yahoo etc spike at the drop of a hat.
What drives the Govt. mad occasionally is text-messaging which is the real internet in China -SARS was well known (not by that name of course) last autumn.

People fear what they don't understand.

I dont know what the big deal is.... I buy everything online.

Why this date?!?!?! What happened?!?!?

Didn't you read the whole post?

International news noticed that fears of offline/realword events (SARS) have driven a society to do more of their daily activities online.

The Internet is now integral, or even vital to society, rather than an intetesting "thing" off to the side.

This brings to mind the dilbert strips about the future and how humanity will die out once virtual reality gets cheaper than dating.

XAOS

What somebody needs to do now is become a door-to-door salesman and start coughing on people when they answer the door, freakin scare them to death.

Yes. This is why our world will continue its downward spiral. People have forgotten what it used to be like....when phones were only used when you couldn't find where your friends were and when you were told to send them mail, you needed postage stamps.

Technology replacing humanity.

Laugh if you must, but we've all seen what it can do. People becoming too wrapped up in their online lifes (Like Hkot/Themaster), and often times hurting themselves or others with the pent up frustration it causes them when they find those lifes to be unfulfilling.

In my heaven, there are no computers.

Actually............lack of human contact is not such a bad thing. I actually think ti will be better if humans were more isolated. On the net, humanity is lovely, in person, they are bi pedal cockroaches.