That line from Shakespeare (Macbeth) popped into my head today. I was coming home from the grocery store, I had already been to the barber, the baker, and dry cleaner. Just all part of an everyday grind, nothing special, but it was a lot of interaction with a good number of my fellow citizens, and I'm sure you can imagine that the "toil and trouble" part was more than apparent. Truth be told, I was thinking about this blog and it was that which brought be to the bubble and, ultimately, Macbeth. I've always liked that line. I always thought the witches in that play were smarter and more insightful than most of the other characters. At least they gave some thought to what was coming down the road.
The idea of using an advanced medium to enhance one's capabilities has been around for some time. Yes, managing fire to heat a vessel of fluid to achieve some kind of end took on a different form during the Industrial Revolution, but using technology for communication purposes has a rather long history as well. For the witches it was a cauldron. For us, it's the Internet.
Macbeth was about the deeds willing to be done on the way to kingly power. We democratized ourselves in the meantime (or at least we like to tell ourselves we have), and it was the Internet -- for those of your old enough to remember -- that was going to shift the balance of power from top to bottom. The Internet leveled hierarchies. We were all in it together, and no one single entity or person was in charge. True equality had been achieved. At least that was the theory.
My first excursion into this realm was in the late 80s, early 90s. You had to type in commands on a black screen to do anything: get your modem going, login to a provider, move to other computers to get files, or negotiate your way to the myriad forums on what was then called Usenet. It was a dark, anonymous realm, but the interactions were serious, sometimes intense, often fun. Not responding to what someone else said was considered unacceptable. If you had nothing to contribute, you were told so. Communication was most often short, direct, to-the-point. Of course, being humans, netizens of the day many discussions degenerated into flame wars (hostile, insulting, often profanity-laced interactions), which were certainly not for the faint of heart. But often ended in some reference to Nazis or Hitler, oddly enough (see Godwin's Law).
No, these were not the "good old days", they were just the "old days". What was different from today, however, is two-fold: it was interactive and heterogenous. By interactive, I mean simply that statements were taken seriously, challenged and responded to. There was give-and-take, back-and-forth. By heterogenous, I mean that the participants were from diverse cultures and backgrounds, with varying interests and intellectual capabilities. As everything transpired via text (no picture, no visuals at all), there were also oddities like full sentences, questions, and not a few well-turned phrases.
This all changed in the mid-90s though with the coming of the Web. The visualizations and the ability to put everything into bright, blinking, colors did its part to kill discussion, but with the rise of so-called social networks and specialized communities, it is too easy these days to simply find one's own kind and retreat. Both the intellectual interaction and the heterogeneity have been eliminated. We can find, or create, our own little bubbles in which to exist and which will not be disturbed by the big, bad world "out there". And it is those bubbles that are at the root of too many toils and trouble.
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