Societal change has always been slow; as Steve's original post
intimated, it's really only sudden disasters that can foster
faster change in a society, and even then there were probably
many decades of displaced Minoans before the Acheans began to
be a recognizably different society.
Some years ago I read an article (I don't remember where) that
drew a fairly clear path from the McCarthy hearings through the
free speech movement (amond other things) in the sixies to the
materialist backlash in the eighties (come to think of it, it
probably looked a lot like
Jim's graph) and what was then the
slow growth of uncensorable real-time global communications of
the Internet.
Of course, this was back when terms like "uncensorable real-time
global communications" were all the rage -- truth is, as the
incumbent society gets online we've got our own displaced Minoans
to deal with, and no major disaster to shake 'em into realizing
that change is afoot.
But they are. How many of us would know about the conference
Marcy went to if it weren't for e-mail? Closer to home, would
we even know each other?
I've been on ISP mailing lists since 1994. Slowly but surely,
the rest of the world is getting online; much as it was here,
we're seeing technically inclined people joining and forming
online communities first, and building ISP's, which allows less
technical people to join in -- but the US and Europe and Japan
already built and tried all the necessary technology, so these
new installations are bigger and better and faster and more
reliable than we'd had to start with over here.
Internet access will not solve everything, not by a long shot,
but I think communication will. At the very least, it will
bring a greater awareness of the connectedness of all people,
all things.
It's hard to see the global effects when you're near the crest
of the tsunami. And it's even harder when change is slow, as
it always is; this may be a small planet but it's got a lot of
cats.
Aah, that brings up a rant I haven't ranted in quite a while; I wonder how it's changed over the past few years. The established capitalists -- near-monopoly telcos, big media, big business, all those post-Minoans I was talking about (with apol
Tracked: Aug 11, 07:23