Douglas Adams and the Internet

(This is a really long quotation, but it's all good, I promise!)

Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn’t have any impact. We’re not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that’s happened to somebody a world away and something that’s happened to someone round the corner. [...] We’ve all become twisted and disconnected and it’s not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don’t impact the world. [...]

But the fourth [kind of communication], the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It’s communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, ‘Hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?’ So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet—so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn’t just say, ‘The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty’ but had all sorts of information; it said, ‘There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that’. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, ‘bang!’ — there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? — well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away! Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.

From Is there an Artificial God?, a speech from Digital Biota 2, 1998

Sorry for the excessively long quotation, but I thought it was necessary to get his point across there. The speech discusses what he calls the four ages of sand: lenses for telescopes, looking outward; lenses for microscopes, looking inward; silicon for computers for computing things we never understood before; and fiber optics, for communication. Every one of those things significantly altered the way people think about their relationship to the world. (Well, not the fiber optics in themselves, as with the other things, but the idea behind them certainly.)

It's cliche by now to talk about the communication revolution of the internet, but the way he says it here...it becomes profound again, for me. The movement of passive acceptance of constant bambardment of media to talking back. Going from a receiver to both receiver and source.

The power of distribution is out of the hands of media corporations, printing presses, etc. Suddenly mass publishing goes from immensely difficult to almost trivial--what, if not that, am I doing here, and for free?! And in doing so the value, contents, purpose, etc. of the messages change.