Thursday, August 7, 2008

3 Iterations: Global Communications

History doesn't repeat itself [but it rhymes sometimes], and contrary to my own expectations, I'm really enjoying the history behind this technological marvel of it's day.  Several recent books about history of the telegraph rollout: 'The Victorian Internet' [Global], and Alice Thompson's 'The singing line', about the Oz rollout. [she's the Great great grand daughter of Charles Todd and, appropriately enough, now works for the London Daily Telegraph.

So, lets start with a potted history of global communications first 3 iterations, and as our "memestreme" Flexible Learning Framework steps into second gear cop an optic on this for starters...

Iteration 1 has got to be the wire that stretched around the world, the Telegraph.

Time: August 1872

Location: Central Mt Stuart, 220Km North of Alice, and according to the best cartographers of the day, this put him at the Mountain closest to our geographical centre.

The Man: Charles Todd

Iteration 2 for my money is the World Wide Web.

Time:  according to Kevin Kelly in 07 it’s age was about 5000 days old.

Location: A nexus near you

The man/kind of: Tim Berners-Lee was the Internet ? so maybe no one individually, and a whole bunch of humans collectively.

Iteration 3: The ‘semantic web’ and various other epithets

Time: Nowish

Location: Any computer connected to the net and/or a 3G network plus a variety of mobiles; iPhone, Blackberry or similar PDA’s

The mankind: The mankind
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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