Edited by author 03-13-2001 11:14 PM
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 18:24:51 -0500I enjoyed your essay on the sand-painted earthquake meme. It reminded me of my second web-epiphany -- that the web was going to fundamentally change our view of ourselves as a species. (Epiphany #1 was, of course, seeing Mosaic in July '93, when all my "technorevolution alarms" rang.)
Those were the early days now being parodied thus:
"I remember when the web was only about 100 sites -- and they ALL WORKED."
"Yeah sure, Grandpa."I'd seen the Cambridge coffeepot, the Vatican Library, the NCSA site, the U of Hawaii, we were building our intranet within DEC... People over the globe were rushing online, wanting to share their interests, their previously arcane data, or their dreams with one another.
At home, I was connection- and PC-restricted to using LYNX, so I tended to be at the office late or weekends, for DEC's bandwidth. But what hadn't yet truly hit me was that the web wasn't only about a new UI and protocol enabling radically easier info-navigation and -sharing. It was going to be an agent of fundamental change because it would let humanity exceed some sort of intellectual flashpoint.
Christmastime '93. I was alone at DEC HQ, speedsurfing sites like NASA, and came upon an early precursor of
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/composites.html -- and my world-view changed.
The trigger was a crude version of what's now at
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/globe/2wklowglb.mpg -- a two-week rotating composite image of full Earth, showing daytime weather patterns. In '93, it was far less complex and beautiful, being only B&W, smaller, and taken from only one POV: an equatorial-geosynchronous satellite. But it was still time-lapsed full Earth -- and I was different afterwards.
I mean no disrespect to religious peoples' beliefs by recalling my feelings:
"I'm looking down on my own planet! But I'm not an astronaut. This is a PC and connection like will be common in a few years. I'm somewhere in this picture; everyone else, too. The entire Internet is here -- and all the undersea cables that knit me to Australia and India are here, hidden beneath the oceans. All the earth's slowly-swirling tectonic plates are underneath those cables, and all its faster-swirling clouds above. I'm perched 23,000 miles above the Equator watching the earth rotate underneath me, the terminator disclosing and reclaiming the days to me. At my "midnight," I can occasionally see sunlight along an entire Great Circle: dawn on one side and dusk on the other. Fortunes of treasure in astronomy, rocketry, telemetry, geophysics, and computer technology are distilled here... and even time, showing me a day in the blink of an eye, so I can see some of the patterns of my living planet.
... Isn't this a little like being a God?"
It wasn't just that I was seeing data new to me. It was that the web was allowing me to jump out of the system in a totally unexpected, recursive, self-referential way. Here was the WWW: a medium so powerful that it could show me my own whole wide world -- at a click. How long would it be before I could jump into virtual subatomic or genomic space with the same ease?
Now of course there've been a lot of bytes over the bridge since '93 -- but that synchronicity experience is still with me... and now whenever heavy weather is upon me here in New England USA, I visit
http://www.intellicast.com/LocalWeather/Wo...s/Boston/RadarLoop/and I feel better -- for if knowledge is power, then at least I feel I have some power over the approaching storms.
Thanks Jamie, for recalling that the web allows us to share bigger pictures and deeper ideas. What I'm getting at in this overlong ramble is my web-slanted view of the closing lines of Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn:"
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." What I, too, was seeing was truth about earth, and that it was beautiful.
/Dan
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