Josh Harris...How did you know?

Josh, you were right, we do live in public. 

How could you have known in 1993 that we would so soon be turning to the internet for almost everything including news, relationships, entertainment, education, and even sex?  You somehow knew that many people are voyeuristic and enjoy watching others live their daily lives. There was no reality TV back then, but now it rules prime time programming… and you knew it before the any of us – including the networks! Students now use Ratemyprofessors.com to carefully select which instructor will best meet their specific expectations before signing up for classes. Some people find their mates on dating sites; others simply surf for random sexual gratification on chat roulette. I almost daily discover something that shocks me about the web, but it seems that you could just sit back and say “I told you so.”

As a youngster, I loved the Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World (an exhibit from the 1964 World’s Fair depicting American lifestyle over the last century). My favorite set was the one that contained animatronic people doing the unimaginable - watching live television from all over the globe, requesting recipes from a “com puuu ter” and playing games on their TV!! These seemed as improbable to me at the time as moving to Mars.

I didn’t log onto the internet until 1997 and then only used it to email my friends back home rather than sending snail mail, and thought myself quite advanced. In 2000, I began some online research of my ancestry and was able to arrange a meeting between a person I had never met and a large group of relatives, and again I thought I was pretty tech savvy. Recently I took an online test to measure my millennialness and found that I was 83% Millennial, a fact that I am quite proud of, even so, I cannot imagine what might be next on the internet horizon. 

Dr. Raimist uses facebook to communicate with innumerable people that either share her past, profession, passion or interests. She works facebook like no one I have ever known, impacting not only her ‘friends’ but actually wielding her tech weapon to defend the persecuted and illuminate social injustices. She seems a Web-based Wonder Woman – and quite frankly I believe she is!