I am sitting in an online class through the training dept at work. At the same time, I am emailing, IMing, reading message boards for both work and leisure, editing images, blogging, and so much more. All of this using a laptop the size of one volume of an encyclopedia that costs little enough that almost anyone can afford one. It has more computing power than 10,000 people with abacuses (abacii?). But as amazing as all of that is, the real wizardry is in the network.
We live in a world that has more interconnectivity than anyone could have concieved of just 3 decades ago. It basically brings the knowledge of the whole world into any home with an Internet connection. The computerized parts of the world now function as a single repository of knowledge that is sorted and index in an almost infinite number of ways. Sometimes I imagine the globe as a single living brain with decentralized functions. It is a powerful and amazing thought and it gives me a lot of hope for the future of the species.
Then I watch the news and realize that we have so much more ground to cover before we function as a unified being. As is too often the case, our minds have vastly out performed our souls. If only there were a network to connect ourselves as easily as we connect our technology. Then we would truly be an advanced world.
