Rhyming and Sharing

I think back to the wonder of kindergarten show-and-tell and how sharing a new discovery not only made me feel proud, but also helped me to understand the world a little bit more. Sharing for me was more centralized and I could only reach a few other kids within my immediate sphere. Now, I could get on the phone and call someone (if I had their number) and talk about my new discovery, but it was hard for them to visualize its appeal without seeing it firsthand. As I got older, I was able to use a Polaroid camera to capture a picture and share it with my friends and mail it to some family members, which was handy even though it took a long time to get feedback. In the mid 1990s Technology began to advance to a degree that I could now email or text someone a message and receive a response in seconds, even while I lived in Germany. Asynchronously, I could visit a discussion board to ask or answer questions and receive a response from literally anyone in the world. I could chat with someone in real time about any topic that was of particular interest to me. After awhile, I could even take a picture, scan it, and then send it to anyone in the world—this revelation was amazing and enabled me to learn and share more with others than any other time in my life.

Now technology has advanced to the degree where we can share anything, from the banal to the revolutionary in split seconds and added to the world collective memory. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are simple tools that have provided a platform from which to connect with one another and communicate.

The recurring rhyme in technology that I connect most with is tools to share with others. From smart phones to 3-D video conferencing systems, we are constantly improving on how we share and collaborate with each other. As Kelly (2007) foresees an interconnected web that shares all information with any end user, I see a level of sharing that is unprecedented in scale. Regardless of the type of information, whether personal of commercial, the notion of separate countries will begin to dissolve and a renewed global community will emerge.

Reference
Kelly, K. (2007, December). The next 5,000 days of the Web [Speech]. Speech delivered at the EG 2007 Conference, Los Angeles. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html