The internet is 20 years old. Ah, to be twenty again! Forgive me as I wax nostalgic here, but technology is sorority sister I have grown up with for the past two decades.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I I felt like I knew everything at 19! Life was simple and planned out. All opportunity ahead of me. I thought of the internet the same way. It was fresh and new. It was the future.
In order to understand my history with the internet let us go back a touch earlier. In the late 80s, my boyfriend at the time (now Husband) gets himself into huge trouble because he rang up a $3,000 ($6 an hour in those days) bill using CompuServe on a 300 or 1200 Baud modem. Lucky for my husband, my Mother-in-Law was not angry for long and considered the crazy bill an investment in her son’s technology future. To this day he still serves as the family IT support help desk so he is likely paid in full on his crazy teenage debt. Without the exposure to my husband’s addiction…passion at such an early age I don’t know where I would be today. The world of computer technology was opened up for me and I had my own private tutor. (He also taught me how to drive, but that is a blog post for another day).
Life was not the straight path I thought it would be when I was 19. Two months before my 20th birthday my father passed away suddenly. My life plans went through the equivalent of government-issue cross-cut shredder. The confidence I had a few fleeting months before was reduced to a memory as I tried to figure out who I was in the new world order. My sorority sister, technology, was there for me. I threw myself into my schoolwork and learned all there was to know about business applications of technology. I was not interested in coding, I wanted to know we could extract business value from this new medium. I studied locally and internationally. When I returned to the United States, I took administrative types of jobs maximizing the business value of technology. Companies paid me to train in word processing, spreadsheets, web-publishing and graphics programs. My Mother seemed to find comfort in the logic of technology as well. She was an avid user of tech toys and I was lucky enough to always have a computer in my home.
Apple IIe was the first in 1984 and she has upgraded to the latest and greatest technology even today. Yes my Mother is the coolest techie grandmother around, she is even on Facebook and can text with the best of them!
Is it any wonder that I ended up at EMC, a technology company. As I have blogged here before, EMC is also my Mother’s initials so it was a perfect match. EMC publishes an online periodical called ON Magazine. The latest issue is a celebration of the Web’s 20 year anniversary. Many EMC bloggers (Len Devanna, Barry Burke, Gina Minks just to name a few) that I enjoy have written about the article and the three questions it asks:
* How has the Web changed your life?
* How has the Web changed business and society?
* What do you think the Web will look like in 20 years?
Then I read this at Blog Stu “To continue the conversation, I am tagging Natalie Corridan-Gregg (EMC), Aneel Lakhani (works for IBM, speaks for himself) and Andrea Meyer (Working Knowledge) to continue the #20years discussion. Cool. Skin in the game 
Before I go any further the geek in me has to say out loud to the blogosphere that I find incredibly ironic that the traditional gift for a twentieth anniversary (such as what the web is celebrating) is china, given all of the issues around China and internet searches that are circulating currently, but I digress…
* How has the Web changed your life?
After reading my introduction to this post I think it is clear that technology has been a thread throughout my life, but specifically I would say that I am much more informed. I planned my wedding online, prepared for the birth of my son online, researched jobs and created my resume online, I searched for my home and car online. As a working mother almost all of my shopping is done online (in the wee hours of the morning). Christmas Cards and holiday shopping would be impossible for me without my sorority sister WWW.
* How has the Web changed business and society?
How has the Web changed business? Let us turn that around. Can you have a business without the Web? Sure. If you are a gas station or dry cleaner, but even then how do people find you if they don’t drive by your location? I would say that the Web is business. It is how we communicate. It is how we research. It is how we live. How do you separate business and society in this question? In the world of 24 x forever my work and home lives bleed into each other without definition. Polly Pearson blogged about the death of the “Out of Office ” message back in August of 2008 and mused “[Is it because] Everyone is on wireless devices… thus always ‘in’ the virtual office?” My working mother lens says yes. Technology has made it possible for us to be virtually anywhere and everywhere. I work 7 days a week, I am a mother and wife 7 days a week (feels like eight). The Working Mother Experience book tells me that I am not alone. All working parents are fighting to give 100% to their kids and their careers and ignoring the funny math that creates. Facebook is a double edged sword I now know way too much about some people, but it is an invaluable tool in my “staying sane” arsenal. Remember the funny math from the previous sentence? Facebook allows me to pretend to have a social life on top of the alleged 200% of myself I am giving away elsewhere. It acts as a big red “STOP” light for me on the roller coaster of life. I can check on how my peeps are doing when it is convenient for me, a la that wee hour in the morning shopping. When I see Girlfiend Y posted that she spent the night in the ER, guess what pops to the top of my to do list post 8 am. That is right calling Girlfriend Y. Girlfriend Y would never ‘bother’ me with such things as asking for a shoulder to cry on, but my friend Facebook allows her to hint she might need one. Very Cool. Back to the concept of the lack of Church and State between business and society web application for a moment. Facebook has allowed me to be friends with co-workers I would never have a chance to really get to know. Yes in some cases it was not the best idea, but 80% or more of the time, I am thrilled with the connectedness I feel with the fellow EMCers. I see their kids pictures, I can navigate around a bad day because I know in advance. On the down side, a fellow EMCer is responsible for my slipping into the grips of the Farmville application. My toddler actually owns my ‘farm’ and enjoys it immensely, but I have to remember when his crops are due to harvest and of course those annoying Facebook status messages are the result. You can do a Twitter search to see the most popular global topics and learn a bunch about how people feel. The local election in Massachusetts on January 19th is a terrific example. Nothing is local anymore. A blogger I read out of Delaware wrote a terrific piece on the MA election and the effect it would have on the Nation. It was eye opening.
Society has found a way to merge itself with the never-ending demands of the global economy. We adapt.
* What do you think the Web will look like in 20 years?
What do I think the Web will look like, or what do I fear the Web will look like? The Web, like many of us at the tender age of 20, can make good choices or poor choices that affect the future. My fear is that in the quest for more and more data mining that privacy will become a thing of the past. So much of business and society is simmered into the very foundation of the current iteration of the Web that extricating the two is near impossible. That is ok in peaceful hands, but people’s lives can be ruined by accusation, identities can be stolen, the path to truths obscured. I receive all of my new from the Web through ‘trusted’ sources. There was a horrible Sandra Bullock movie called The Net released in 1995. The movie was not able to suspend disbelief for me, given the leaps it took with technology. The concept of the movie, where someone’s identity could be erased and replaced, via software sits with me as a possible scary outcome.
On the other, angel on my shoulder, side I can see the Web uniting the world. It is already starting to happen. The world felt 9/11. The world felt the Tsunami. The world is wrapping up Haiti in a big hug as I write this blog post. The best thing I can see coming out of the internet in twenty years is people seeing each other for their similarities instead of their differences. We are all human beings. We need the same basics of food, water, love, shelter. We love our families and want better for our children. If the internet can build global community then that would be the best of all outcomes.
To keep the discussion going, I appeal to David Spencer, and his terrific Dave Talks Shop blog, to give us his thoughts. I look forward to reading his perspective.
