The year was 1995. The world wide web (www) had been around for about six years. Its underlying technology, hypertext, was first introduced to the public earlier by Apple in a short-lived product called Hypercard. Since then, it had mainly been used by academics and technologists.
But in 1995, flowers began to bloom in the world wide web… literally! And lunch…
In 1992, owner Jim McCann had already renovated the florist industry by introducing an “online store” on the popular dial-up service, CompuServe. In 1995 McCann expanded the store, bringing it to the world wide web. People could now order flower deliveries using their computer!
Pizza Hut also introduced online pizza ordering. What is today routine was, back then, revolutionary!
What Else Can This Thing Do?
Word spread and more and more people figured out how to put a browser on their computer to check out this amazing new thing, this world wide web. Soon the stumbling block became figuring out how to find more great value out there across this ‘internet’ thing.
Some savvier users soon found ‘YP’, a program that provided a directory to many of the computer servers connected to the internet and providing content across the web. It became instantly obvious that a more accessible directory was critical to the growth of adoption and acceptance.
AltaVista, Google, Yahoo, and many others answered that call, delivering ‘search engines’ making it easy to enter a few keywords and find many servers available at a simple click of the mouse.
At this point, the first generation of the world wide web became the age of Search.
What Would YOU Like to Know About ME?
Things changed powerfully about a decade later. In 2004, Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Severin introduced thefacebook.com on the world wide web to emulate a manual version that allowed people across the university to connect with and learn more about each other. On the web, it didn’t take long for that community to expand to include the entire world. A year earlier, MySpace.com had been launched. While it was the first social network to reach a global audience, it didn’t achieve the resilience required to last. First run out of it’s developer’s living room, LinkedIn was also introduced in 2003 and is considered the premier social network for businesspeople today.
More social networks emerged, some of which were focused on other specific communities, and continue to arrive even today, 20 years later.
This second generation of the world wide web can safely be considered the age of the Self.
Where Do We Go from Here?
In both cases, the core of social network desire was based primarily on what users wanted. So, the relevant question here in this series is really, “What Do You Want Next?”
At this point, I’ll step back from being analytical and hope you’ll indulge me in being unusually prescriptive.
The Age of Search was all but unavoidable. No technology, like hypertext, can be successful unless people adopt and use it. Without valuable content being made readily available to users, the web would have quickly died a sad and ugly death. Search prevented that from happening.
The Age of Self was the product of human nature. Very little interests the typical human more than they are interested by themselves. People want to share themselves, have others learn about them. Sometimes they just want to vent their rage and their anger. Nowhere has any of this been easier than it has been on social networks. It is safe to say that the history of the world has been seriously altered by the ability of some people to indulge their narcissism on social media.
Next, I’d like to propose we all band together and work together to follow Search and Self with ‘The Age of Survival’ driven across every social network everywhere. Why the age of survival?
Social Media May Be the Only Way
The point of no return in our current climate crisis keeps getting adjusted to be sooner and sooner. Where once it was decades, it seems like it’s only a few years away now. We see polar ice caps melting, wildfires all over the world, unprecedented heat everywhere, floods, earthquakes. The abuse we have inflicted on our planet is coming back to bite us, and potentially chew us up and spit us out.
Yet it is estimated that our own country, the United States, only represents about 10% of the problem. In other words, we’re contributing about 10% of the carbon emissions that are creating the disaster. It is also estimated that India and China may each represent as much as 30% of the problem, though China is beginning to make changes based on floods and heatwaves hammering them.
So the real challenge, in addition to shifting our own power consumption to renewable sources and eliminating our dependence upon fossil fuels, is to convince two enormous countries, and many smaller ones, to do the same. And, currently, they don’t seem predisposed to do so.
Our government and others are making less than a faint effort to create this existential change. There are some organizations vainly crying out, but it just doesn’t seem like anyone is yet taking this threat seriously.
Why I Take This So Seriously
I suspect there are many grandparents who, like myself, are considered about being able to fulfill our responsibility to provide a healthy planet for our grandchildren to live on. Every generation has owned and fulfilled this responsibility until now, but we stand to be the first to fail.
Failure means ocean levels continuing to rise until they flood large swaths of every land mass. Failure means more and more years of record heat, continually fiercer and fiercer hurricanes and typhoons. Wildfires everywhere and anywhere that can burn. And each of these events will carry with it larger and larger numbers of casualties. It’s not getting better, it’s getting much, much worse.
The science is copiously documented. The damage is done. And we may not long be able to reverse it.
My fervent request to all my readers and anyone you know is to take to social media and start demanding action. Let’s make this the age of survival, using the social networks not to promote our glorious selves, but to demand effective action from anyone and everyone capable of taking it. We need them to negotiate with those countries who are still doing the most damage. We need to enlist NATO, the UN, and every billionaire who is thinking about how they’re going to leave the planet when the time comes.
Only working together can we still save our world. We need to stop talking about it and start taking real, impactful action. Clearly, none of us can do it alone. Personally, I’m trying to reduce my own carbon footprint by switching to an electric car, installing solar to power my home, and burning wood instead of gas to cook whenever I can. That feels absolutely infinitesimal, like a drop in the ocean.
If we call contribute such a drop, that will make some difference, but nowhere near enough. We, the population of this beleaguered planet need to bond our voices together and scream at the top of our digital lungs to get everyone in a position of responsibility to stop their ridiculous political bickering, drop their endless self-serving nonsense, and all join together to prevail upon every country in the world to stop increasing the damage and start doing their utmost to reverse it.
It's now beyond an “inconvenient truth.” It’s an impending disaster. Start posting now and keep posting. Message your congresspeople and other officials. Message everyone. Let’s create a deafening roar before the planet inflicts a terminal roar on all of us.
Dedication
Let me personalize this plea by dedicating it to my five-year-old grandson Franklin. Brilliant and beautiful, I see Franklin as the continuation of my family and my line of DNA into the future. I also love him incomparably.
That love only increases my sense of guilt in my failure to provide him with what my forbears provided to me, a livable planet.
Social Media, from Search to Self to Survival: If social media can enable foreign agents to deceive enough of our population to get truly evil idiots elected to high office, we can turn it around and use it to save the world. But only if we all do it together.