There’s a great post on Ars Technica on the history of the noosphere. The ‘noosphere’ is the term people use for the network as an ethereal communications medium – a place of pure thought, in other words, that transcends whatever physical manifestation that instantiates the medium.
If you were online in 1996, you remember some of the anything-is-possible topsy-turvy feelings. But more important, I think, is the history of thought that accompanies any potent tech advance; where zealous practitioners say: this changes everything. Like this, at the dawn of radio:
Ditto, concurred a colleague: “Let a legislator now commit himself to some policy that is obviously senseless, and the editorial writers must first proclaim his imbecility to the community. But let the radiophone in the legislative halls of the future flash his absurdities into space and the whole state hears them at once.”
Obviously it didn’t work out that way; and it would be easy to get cynical, and say that nothing is ever any different, which is the same kind of stupid dichotomous thinking that causes a lot of the problems that surround us every day. A rule of thumb is that no technology is likely to change the essence of human nature; but human nature can be, and is, tweaked all the time. So it’s interesting to see how many times these utopian prognostications have been made, and what they’ve been made about. And what has really been changed, and what hasn’t.