Miracles and prognostications

Yesterday afternoon, as I emerged into the San Francisco sunshine, the path of my day suddenly struck me as something extraordinary.

I had breakfasted in Santa Barbara, been driven to Burbank, flew to Oakland, and taken an underground train under the Bay to San Francisco... all in the number of hours I could count on my fingers.

This would have seemed miraculous a mere century ago. Any of these actions in 1906 would have been the stuff of pure fantasy, the most outrageous science fiction. (Ok, maybe not having breakfast in Santa Barbara, but otherwise....) The radical shifts in human experience over the last few generations is profound, and it is so easy to forget about them, so easy to forget that the way we live today has very little resemblance to how humans have lived throughout history.

And, of course, it continues to change at a lightning pace.

My attention was drawn to this article from Newsweek in 1995, decrying all the optimism about the internet.

A short quote: "Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?"

And yet, today I am working from home, use Wikipedia regularly for basic fact checking, and help people use online classrooms for training seminars that include participants from all over the country. Most of my dating life comes from people I meet online, and many professional and personal relationships started and are maintained online. MoveOn.org uses the online world to push hard politically on a regular basis.

Some of the critiques of the 12 year old article still remain, but the vast majority of his comments reveal someone who can only see the state of the world as it is, not how it will continue to change. This particular pundit saw the state of the internet at 1995 and mocked those who were envisioning the miracles of tomorrow, the logical extensions of what they saw in the present.

I am not a technological visionary. I don't know what the next twelve years will bring us. I don't know what the world will look like in my dotage (although I am hoping for something other than a smoking ruin). But I was suddenly reminded that we are indeed in an age of miracles.