Tristan Louis put together an interesting symposium of how the Internet Protocol has been and will continue to embed itself in our everyday lives, so much so that it becomes entirely pervasive and transparent. Intro – Always On – IPzation – Participatory Applications – Conclusion.
It is interesting to see how my friends, siblings and peers have incorporated technology such as IM, SMS and blogging into their lives. These “disruptive technologies” have been faced by prior generations in their adopting the telephone, television, radio and wagon wheel; however, every day brings a new adventure in “changing with the times” at an increasing rate. Heck, it is just darn weird to hear baby boomers openly discuss IPTV or Wikipedia in public. In fact, I can actually remember a time in 1994 when I asked my English teacher if I could use the Internet to work on a paper and her response was: “the Interwha?”
Just as the war on drugs has arguably taught Americans the metric system, so to have socially wanton applications like MySpace taught a group of non-geeks netiquete, how to cut & paste html code, how to modify CSS tags and how to maintain a website.
Note: there is a website called Always-On which initially discussed these issues, unfortunately today most of the material is not written with the nerd in mind.