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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

You have to view things from a bigger timeline. The Internet is only about 25 years old. In the grand span of human history, that is nothing. It's so insignificant that making final pronouncements about it is really nonsensical.

I always go back to the printing press analogy. It took about 50 to 100 years after its invention for serious societal change to start happening: The Reformation, Counter-Reformation, birth of Protestantism, etc.

Give it time. Networked communication is just getting started.

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While I agree with other replies to your comment that the internet became prolific/mainstream much faster than the printing press, I think your point still stands when looking at things from the perspective of a human life or culture. We're still the same humans that we were back when things perhaps didn't change as rapidly.

Sure, the internet was a lot faster at becoming ubiquitous, but humans are still humans. Our society still needs time to adapt to internet, because 25 years old, as you point out, is really not that much on the scale of a human life or an institution or society.

Proliferation of the Internet is much faster than that of the printing press, because vast majority of the population is now able to read and write. In the late 1400s, reading books was a fringe activity of a few educated people, mostly priests.

People under 30 do not remember the world without Internet anymore; 25 years is a generation. That said, it is really too soon to proclaim any final judgments.

I’m just saying, Bitcoin barely existed a decade ago. YouTube barely existed 15 years ago. Google barely existed 20 years ago. A lot has happened in a very short period of time. It might take awhile to unravel these things.

The iPhone isn’t even 15 years old. People have cats older than that.

My work was talking about a 10 year plan yesterday. In the back of my mind I couldn't help but realise that the majority of the population was just getting smart phones 10-11 years ago.

My parents didn't know what WiFi was, internet culture was still largely for nerds, etc.

How does the rate of spread of the Internet compare to that of the printing press? I think the ubiquity of the internet is what makes people comfortable to judge it as if it is mature.

By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes.

It took roughly 30 or 40 years for the press to be widely distributed around Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...

> I think the ubiquity of the internet is what makes people comfortable to judge it as if it is mature.

Technology isn't going to stay exactly the same indefinitely. It just seems like a complete lack of imagination about the future to me.

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