Response to Dr. Pickett's article on the 20th anniversery of the WWW

[David L. Perrings]

Reflections on the WWW

I for one really do not make a conscious distinction between the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet even though they are two different things. The Web  is dependent on the internet and in my mind the internet is old enough to allow it to be thought of in historical terms were as the Web is younger then my own kids, It has not even reached puberty. It is mind blowing what has happened in the last twenty years, things are changing in the computer world so fast that it is outstripping our own since of biological time.

From Star Trek …..”SPACE, the final frontier”    what happened to that vision of the future, it has been replaced. The SPACE AGE has been replaced with the INFORMATION AGE. The United States is currently without an active manned space flight program. A recent cell phone commercial demonstrated this very dramatically by lining up a various technological advances in historical order and then proceeding to go down the line and topple each one in order. These items get bigger and bigger up to the Saturn V Apollo Rocket and then quickly reduce in size to that of cell phones. The image is a little unsettling. Have our future aspirations as a people really been reduced to see what the next version of the iPHONE is going to look like? 

Our world is changing from analog to digital at a very fast rate (from real to approximate), I just hope that we do not move so fast that we leave the real world in the dust altogether to only be left with an infinitely long string of 1’s and 0’s.

Looking past the cell phone maybe it will be “MIND, the final frontier” instead of SPACE. Maybe this is what Stanley Kubrick was trying to tell us in the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey with his mind blowing psychedelic trip to the planet Jupiter in response to man’s quest for a trip to the moon and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the Psychedelic Bus taking a different kind of trip.

Or maybe WISDOM will finally prevail and we will look for a balanced approach to life between mind body and spirit.

 

 

David Lewis Perrings, PE
Civil Engineer
P/A Design Resources, Inc.
3021 Citrus Circle, Suite 150

Walnut Creek, CA 94598

925/210-9300 phone

925/210-9303 fax
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