Twenty years from now you are sitting in a pub at a quiz night. They ask you to name the year the USA saw its first black President sworn in. Will you know the answer instantly? Will you remember it vividly because you were there or because you got up early to watch it live on the tele. If you are born in the next two years then it will be nothing special, the normal. It may be something your parents have talked about or something you have studied at school but it will never have the impact it has now.
It got me thinking about things which were utterly life changing for one generation or decade and then go on to be so routine, so normal and utterly lacking in the spectacular.
Chances are children born in the western world today will never know a time when they do not have computers in their lives. The internet will always have been there. The ability to connect and communicate with almost anywhere in the world in a split second will seem the most normal thing. I still remember the first time I opened what passed for a browser in those days. You relied on people and magazines to tell you about exciting sites to read. I watched the internet go through its less attractive scrolling marquee and blink text teenage years. I look back nostalgically at the first html page I wrote in notepad.
It wasn’t really that long ago but the internet changed my life. It won’t change the lives of those born today. No doubt there will be something else.
