How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

Photo: Douglas Adams by Chris Ogle.

Some golden oldies: Douglas Adams on how we lost interactivity a hundred years ago, and how we have finally gotten it back, and how that is a good thing (1999); and on electronic publishing (1998). These two essays contain one good idea after another, so it would be hard to summarize them here. Nevertheless, a few quotes:

What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.

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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.