Thursday, July 30, 2015

How Will You Celebrate World Wide Web Day?


August 1 is World Wide Web Day.  Will you celebrate such a day?  How could or should one honor this day?

Some companies wouldn’t exist if there were no web – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber – and many things would be vastly different without the Internet.  It would be 1985, a time when things were done manually, when communication was done in person, when the physical world created barriers, and when books were made out of paper and sold in stores.

The web is continuing to grow, expand, change, and challenge life as we know it.  There have been mini-revolutions, from shopping patterns and ebooks to email and social media, but none of these things will compare to the next phase of what develops online.  

In fact, the next stage could be the perfecting of the changes that have resulted with the digitization of life.  Or the next stage could be a revolt to the revolution.  I don’t mean a backlash or a protest against technology – no, that’ll be phase three when robotics and invasive, spying software, hackers and government intrusions force people to look for an alternate network.  

Phase two will be disrupters to disrupters.  For instance, Uber upends taxis now, just as Priceline reduces travel agents to order-taking.  But what happens when there becomes competition to Google, Amazon, Twitter and others who seem like kings?  Further, what happens when not just a competitor arises – but a new technology comes about to completely displace an existing one?

To celebrate WWW Day is something that comes with mixed emotions.  On the one hand, it honors progress and a visionary future, but it also tramples on the present, treating it like a distant past from the horse and buggy era.  We don’t want to contribute to the demise of the world we’re born into, but we don’t want to miss a chance to make it better, faster, cheaper, and easier to access.

When planes soared past trains and buses, few cried.  When television surpassed radio, no one got depressed.  When autos replaced horses, the world cheered.  But the Internet comes with mixed emotions. There are many more plusses to outweigh the negatives – but the potential for the negative is increasing and comes with higher stakes.  We’re becoming addicted to – and dependent upon clicking our lives away.  We all do it -- and it’s getting to be alarming.

Celebrate World Wide Web Day, but don’t forget to touch the real world that’s outside the plastic box in your palm.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015


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