The Connected World

Like most blogs I write they revolve around the idea that every human is connected in this world far more than the generation before them. I recently re-watched the film: The Village and this brought up a good point had the Internet and communities not evolved.

For those unaware, the film is about a tiny village in which all inhabitants are scared of "monsters" that live in the woods. This keeps the villagers fearful of leaving their town and they grow up among each other, until one day a child falls ill. After much discussion they send "Ivy", a blind girl, into the woods with a piece of paper and told to walk to the end of the woods.

The twist in this movie occurs when the above girl stumbles onto a paved road running into a park ranger who easily is dressed like 50 years has passed. We learn that the civilization the village is built is surrounded by the real present world. The girl is given the medicine and returned to the village truly unaware of what she saw, as the elders vote to continue living in the past in the village.

This movie got me wondering - why did the elders lie to their entire population? Did their past traumas justify lying to everyone?

Moving into the point of this post is we live in a connected world. I remember shoveling snow to make enough money to buy a 150ft Ethernet cable so I could drag a cable from our router up a flight of stairs into my room. This turned my computer from a gaming machine to an infinite pool of knowledge.

Google hadn't really kicked off yet, but I was using AskJeeves, Yahoo and Altavista to search whatever I was curious about. This led researching thousands of thousands of things related to web development, Internet networking structure and how to beat a variety of video games.

I remember visiting the parent's place and finding some of my self-made binders of documentation. Hundreds of pages of just forums, official language documentations and quick facts for HTML, CSS, PHP and more. I was building my own offline repository of knowledge for when I wasn't near my computer.

The era of asking parents, buying books or attending conferences to glean knowledge was losing steam compared to the infinite knowledge of the connected world.  The connected world knew when I googled about a random shadow transparent blob in my eyesight that it was "eye floaters" and perfectly normal unless they appeared in mass.

The Internet does not judge when you research anything. Which helps free users who live in a situation where knowledge is contained, limited or even just fed in lies. So I'll end this with a quote and I'm not sure who originally said it, but "knowledge is power."