I got my first email account in the summer of 1998. It was a Hotmail account. Someone dragged me to a local café and signed me up. It wasn’t that advanced at the time and I wasn’t overly impressed.
Was email great at the time? Sure it was, but I didn’t see it. I missed the potential and instead focused on the limitations of the service.
To use Hotmail you pretty much needed access to an internet café and had to be willing to spend five bucks for half an hour’s time. Surf the internet? Forget it. You got Hotmail, that’s it. You also needed the patience of a Buddhist monk given how long it could take for a terminal to become available.
Basically I thought email was novelty, nothing more, and I’ve been eating my words ever since. Now I couldn’t imagine my life without it and there now exists people alive today that have never lived in a world without it.
Think about that for a minute.
For you, me and anyone else over the age of 10, email changed our paradigm of communication completely and forever. But for those under the age of 10, they were born into this new paradigm, no change necessary. To them, email is communication and vice versa. Email is as natural to them as colour televisions and dishwashers are to us.
The naysayers and cynics can doubt the emergence cable transit all they want. But they’re wrong . . .
The Medellin Metrocable. Image by Steven Dale.
That paradigm shift’s already happened, it’s just invisible to most people. Yet to a generation of kids in Medellin, gondolas and transit are a natural fit. No change, paradigm shift or persuasion necessary. Why? Because they were born with it.
To them, this entire website would be a complete waste of time.