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Showing posts from June 1, 2010

When the Web Goes Wrong

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Much as I (almost) hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember life before the internet.  (Yeah, there actually was life, pre-Web... and it didn’t even involve horses and buggies. Imagine that.) Of course, I also remember a time when there were no cellphones. (Whoa. That’s like mind-boggling to anyone under the age of 30 or so, right?) But here’s the thing--it wasn’t a bad life; you can hardly miss something which has yet to be invented. We relied on telephones wired in to our homes and businesses, and we wrote a lot more letters. We also had considerably more face-to-face interactions. That’s just the way it was... and the way it had been for most of the 20th century, actually. We all know what happened during the last quarter of last century, though. Technology underwent one of those phenomenal surges, resulting in an unbelievable amount of new stuff (and new possibilities). No longer is it necessary to conduct business during traditional hours or be tied to a landline; we can roam