Copyright 1995 Richard Seltzer
This is the introduction to a book entitled The Way of the Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome. You can buy this book on diskette from Amazon.com.
My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002), on CD ROM, includes the full text of this book plus Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, The Social Web, and hundreds of related articles. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat.
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We need to remind ourselves that rapid change is part of the human condition. Our current accelerated pace seems especially frantic because our society is emerging from a period when change was relatively predictable. However, in the broad perspective of history, the "future shock" we are now experiencing is not the exception, but the rule.
For those of us growing up in middle-class America, the period of twenty years after World War II was an anomaly. The world of "Father Knows Best" and "Donna Reed" and "The Nelsons" was a world where change was incremental and predictable. Cars would get bigger and faster, and highways would be built to accommodate them. Airliners would get bigger and faster, and airports would be expanded to accommodate them. When in the 1950s, General Electric proclaimed, "Progress is our most important product," they meant steady, incremental, predictable progress. The original Tomorrowland in Disneyland -- both the themepark and the television show -- was a friendly, familiar place, a way of life you could easily extrapolate from the world you lived in.
We came to presume that such a level of social, economic, political and technological stability was the norm. As the pace of change has accelerated in recent years, we have had to scramble to cope. And we have come to believe that our situation is unique -- that we are being forced to face more rapid change and more difficult changes than previous generations.
But read Mark Twin's Life on the Mississippi and consider how rapidly the Mississippi steamboat industry rose and fell. Check on the Pony Express which only lasted 17 months before new technology made it obsolete. Read panoramic novels set in the 19th or the early 20th century, and see the world transformed again and again by technology or war or depression.
Rapid and unpredictable change is the norm. Future shock was a shock to those of my generation because we had the luxury of growing up in a time of extraordinary stability and came to expect that similar conditions would continue for the foreseeable future. We didn't develop the skills and attitudes needed to deal with rapid change. We didn't learn to expect the unexpected, to anticipate the rise and fall of entire industries.
Now we live in a world where the growth opportunities are in industries like computers and biotech that barely existed when we were in college. And the basic skills expected in most any job today were not taught when we were in college.
What's happening on the Internet today is both a symptom of the times and an opportunity for many of us to learn, to grow, and to reinvent our lives in greater harmony with the times. This is not a dehumanizing technology, but rather one with the capacity to help us rehumanize life -- the chance for a fresh start.
The rest of the Way of the Web
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