"When we started to get interactivity back."
True brilliance is when you say something that makes others think "yes, of course; why hadn't I thought of that?"

I just read an amazing article on Douglas Adams' site, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, published in 1999, that is amazingly prescient in regards to a lot of significant things that have arisen between then and now. There are a lot of themes that run through the essay, but my favorite is about interactivity, and the ludicrous notion that we needed to invent a word to describe something so fundamental to human nature:

...‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Way back in 1999, when exploded media / blogging / the long tail / the death of MSM / etc were still unformed thoughts in the back of some revolutionary minds, Adams was laying it out for us. And after reading that, doesn't it seem obvious that the 20th century was a blip on the radar; a time when our culture had outpaced technology to such a point that the culture itself was disrupting natural patterns of social development? In this light, everything that has happened in the past six years - from blogging to social networks to wikis - seems completely obvious. Our technology is finally catching up to our new global village.

This idea also nicely sums up a lot of the current trends in a simple way - more human connection, no matter where or when. Isn't that at the core of most popular new technologies? Email, IM, blogs, TiVos, iPods, podcasts, video games, even BitTorrent is focused on allowing people access to each other and the culture where and when they want. It seems to be a current trend among every popular development in technology.

(Of course, the notion that we are hastening a Restoration is wonderfully romantic...and therefore gleefully appealing! Hopefully it will turn out to be true. It's certainly a time of comparable change.)

Adams also notes that "technology" is a relative term - chairs were once technology, as were paper and mud. One generation's Bible-burning technology is the next's stapler. For my generation computers and cell phones are considered more carefully than furniture; for our children, it will be home fabrication machines and space vacations. (Really.)

Logically (now, but a bit of a leap back in 1999), he concludes that pervasive wireless connectivity will allow us to return to our natural tribal state, after a century of being held apart. (And how much more tribal can you get than BitTorrent? It's literally a passing of digital caribou scraps around the fire.) Our new global community may be much larger, but it is "technology" which will let us get past all the dreck of the 20th century and once again communicate and coexist instinctively. In a not-so-abstract way, technology will allow us to behave like the primitive creatures that we are.

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

He saw this in 1999. Where were the rest of us? And how much insight did we lose when he died? I can only imagine the amazing things he would have imagined if he knew his predictions were so close at hand.