Fantastic Article

For today's post, I link to the article below. I do so for a couple of reasons:

1) Because the message of the article is important.
Look, I don't care whether you believe in man-made global warming or not. While I think the evidence is pretty clear that the earth today is warmer than it was 100 years ago, you can certainly make a case that it's not because of anything man is doing (I wouldn't agree with you, but I can certainly understand the argument.). But every time we get a couple of inches of snow or the temperature outside drops below 15 degrees, global warming critics start saying things like, "Guess Al Gore's got nothing to say now!" or "THIS is supposed to be global warming!" It infuriates me because it shows a complete lack of understanding about the theory of global warming. Global warming doesn't suggest that it's going to be 70 degrees outside in February. Global warming is just the idea that the average temperature of the earth over time is rising. The AVERAGE temperature OVER TIME! Not today's temperature. So please, critics of global warming, stop using these tired lines. All they do is demonstrate your ignorance.

2) Because of the Byline at the end of the article.
This is the REAL reason I'm linking to the article. Scroll down to the end and read the byline. I had to read it three times to make sure I saw it correctly.

Read the article.

Unfriended!

Apparently I don't have enough REAL things to worry about...

About a week ago I was looking through the Facebook posts of my friends. Just catching up on what was happening with my peeps. Gettin' the news. Wasting time.

Anyway, as I was scanning through everyone's statuses, I found one from a former classmate of mine that grabbed my attention. And apparently it had grabbed a bunch of people's attention, because she had about 18 comments to her status. As I scanned through the list of comments, one of the names jumped out at me. I don't want to use the real name, so let's just call the guy "Bob." Bob was also a former classmate of mine and we'd been friends on Facebook for a couple of years, and when I saw his name under this other person's comments, I thought, "Oh yeah, Bob. Haven't heard from him in a while. Wonder what he's doing." I clicked on his name so that I could go to his "Wall." When I got there, all I could see was his profile picture, a list of his friends, and a message that said, "Add as Friend." I was stunned.

No wonder I hadn't heard from him in a while! At some point, I'd been unfriended! After a moment's consideration I shrugged my shoulders and then thought to myself, "Oh well, his loss!" And I went on with my life.

Or so I thought.

I woke up in the middle of the night that night, and for whatever reason I couldn't fall back to sleep. This happens to me occasionally, and I cope with the insomnia by sort of Rolodexing through the events of the day, searching--I guess--for a topic boring enough to put me back to sleep. It usually doesn't work. Instead of focusing on something boring, I usually end up stuck on something that's really bugging me. And what I ended up stuck on that night was Bob.

What had I done to make him unfriend me? Had I written something offensive in a blog post? Had I made an insensitive comment? Did I link to a video that had something terrible in it? Or did it have nothing to do with the present? Was he angry for some slight I'd made against him when we were in public school together? But that was 25 years ago! If I'd done something I don't even remember it! There's no way anyone is holding me accountable for something I did when I was a child!

Is there?

I tried to tell myself that maybe he was just purging his list of friends to get rid of the ones that he wasn't really that close to. But that couldn't be the case. He and I shared FORTY-ONE mutual friends. Apparently he was still friends with most of the REST of the kids we'd grown up with! What had I done?

I told myself that maybe he'd unfriended me by mistake. The thought occurred to me that maybe I should send him another friend request. That way, if he HAD unfriended me by mistake, he'd see his error and accept my friend request again. And if he HADN'T made a mistake, well, then he'd know that I knew he'd unfriended me. He'd know he hadn't gotten away with sneakily unfriending me without so much as an explanation!

The next day I looked through our mutual friends list again, and I started picking out names that were on the list and getting upset. What? I'd think to myself. Bob and I were WAY closer than he was to THAT guy! And I don't think SHE even liked Bob. I remember her talking about him in Calculus class! Why is he still friends with her!

I know deep in my bones that it's a stupid thing to get upset about. After all, this is a guy that I haven't spoken to face to face since we graduated together a quarter century ago. And despite the fact that he lives in my hometown, I'll probably never see him again. And if it weren't for Facebook, I'd have no idea at all that the guy maybe does or maybe doesn't have a problem with me.

Still, I'm pretty bugged by it all...

And I'm still tossing around the idea of sending him another friend request, just to see what happens...

A Look Back Through Time

A few posts ago I quoted J.C.R. Licklider, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, who--in 1968--correctly predicted many of the ways that we use computers today. I followed that post a few days later with a 1994 video clip that showed Today show correspondents Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble embarassingly wondering aloud how to say the "@" sign and what exactly this "Internet" thing was.

The two posts seem to be polar opposites of one another, the first showing a prescient prophet, the second showing some out of touch fools. But that contrast got me thinking: How much behind the times WERE Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble? Would I have known what the Internet was in January of 1994? Was the word "Internet" commonly used at that time?

To try to figure this out, I went to the archives of Time Magazine. Time has its entire archive of issues online and capable of being searched by keyword. I searched for every article from the beginning of Time (Ha! A pun!) until 1994 that contained the word "Internet" either as a word in the article or as a tagged "keyword" for the article. And the results? Katie and Bryant WEREN'T behind the times, at least not by much. While there were a lot of people going online prior to 1994, most writers weren't referring to the "Internet" nor to the "World Wide Web," which is how we refer to going online these days. Instead, writers tended to call the online world "cyberspace" or "The Information Superhighway." I think most of us would have blankly stared and wondered "What is Internet, anyway?" in 1994.

But you can read for yourself. Here are some of the more interesting articles I found. Just click the date to read them at Time's website.

Article One: February 25, 1985: Remember library card catalogs? The REAL ones? This article correctly predicts their inevitable death.

Favorite quote from Article One: "Libraries have to act fast," says David Nashelsky, senior librarian at the San Jose, Calif., public library. "In the future, a lot of information is going to be available only via computers."

Article Two: April 7, 1986: This is the earliest article I could find that talked about people going online. But this was LONG before the term "Internet" was used in conjunction with people doing this.

Favorite quote from Article Two: "Subscribers use the computer networks with one eye on the clock. Start-up fees are modest (generally less than $50), but hourly costs can vary from $6 at night to as high as $15 during business hours, plus a surcharge for some features." 

Article Three: October 30, 1989: This article isn't really about the Internet, but I found it interesting nonetheless. It's more closely related to the Kindle, I suppose, but I find it interesting that THIS was--in 1989--a piece of technology worth writing about. There are dozens of free websites today that will do what this device did then for $300.

Article Four: February 8, 1993: This essay, which borders on fear mongering, is the first I found that actually uses the word "Internet." Mostly, though, it refers to being online as "cyberspace," and it uses a bunch of made up words like "cyberpunk" that no one uses anymore. I'm sure the guy writing this article thought he was creating an article for the ages, but it's mostly just nonsense now.

My favorite quote from Article Four: Obsessed with technology, especially technology that is just beyond their reach (like BRAIN IMPLANTS), the cyberpunks are future oriented to a fault. 


Article Five: April 12, 1993: This article actually foresees a lot of what's coming on the Internet, but it wrongly assumes that most of it will be happening on our televisions rather than on our computers. A lot of what this article says is merely days away is just now, 18 years later, starting to become commonplace.

Favorite quote from Article Five, written with a tone of "Humph! This'll never happen!": "Vice President Gore talks about making it possible for a schoolchild in Arkansas to have access to a book stored on a computer in the Library of Congress or take a course at a distant college. Mitch Kapor, co- founder of a computer watchdog group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants the superhighway to do for video what computer bulletin boards did for print — make it easy for everyone to publish ideas to an audience eager to respond in kind. He envisions a nation of leisure-time video broadcasters, each posting his creations on a huge nationwide video bulletin board."

Article Six: December 6, 1993: Here's the first article in Time to REALLY bring forth the idea of the Internet. It was published in December of 1993, a month before the Today show video. So maybe Katie and Bryant weren't all that far behind.

Favorite quote from Article Six: The Internet, however, will have to go through some radical changes before it can join the world of commerce. Subsidized for so long by the Federal Government, its culture is not geared to normal business activities.