torn apart at the seams, as my dreams turn to tears... and now for a post about the internet

(when I say internet I may mean world wide web.)

I have to write this.

One of the scariest thoughts I have (amongst others such as nobody existing but the universe being present with no observers, which if you think about it human life is a very arbitrary thing but ohwell.) is that in 100 years, every single person on the internet today (well, almost all of them) will be dead. But the writings of today will still exist, and people will look back on them.

In 200-300 years, perhaps the internet will be used as a historical source, and people will search back and look for contemporary opinions on events happening now and in the immediate future? Maybe people will abandon the internet due to lack of server space and instead use something much more efficient, but keep the internet up as a historical source?

Using the internet to look at information that we have now (on past events such as 100 or 200 years ago) in the future will also be a very strange experience, and when doing research, people will have to filter our time's words out because the information will no longer be relevant or there will be a better version out there?

Will facebook surpass generations? In 100 years, most users of it today will be dead, then what? will it become an obituary site? Will they remember facebook? Will people know about it?

Or will it (like myspace and bebo) almost completely faze out in order to make way for the next big thing? logic says that given the amount of people alive today, the amount of facebook accounts in 100 years should it continue will reach or surpass the population of that time, and that won't include a large portion of the population of that time.

Some of the richest companies on earth at the moment (microsoft, google, apple) make their living off of products not imaginable to the masses 50 years ago. Google in particular, perhaps the single most influential TN-corporation in existance at this date, is less than 15 years old.

The internet has actually changed everything. It is rather incredible to stop and reflect on how much of an influence it has had. Communication with the other side of the globe would take months at the least 200 years ago, then with the telephone (provided a good enough wire was lain) maybe it would take a few minutes, and now with the internet we can relay information almost instantly across the entire globe simultaneously, and it has never been easier to hijack and manipulate information (except perhaps before telephone, by bribing messengers) by a single individual.

And its only going to get bigger.

Also, look back fifty years into the concept of the connected world: the cloud, as it was called by some. A startling insight into today, however, that's just the correct prediction amongst thousands of predictions that are false...