This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Maybe it's because I'm the mother of two daughters, and fascinated by their transformation from children into adults, but when I think of the way the internet has changed and will continue to change, I see it in terms of a technology coming out of its adolescent stage and growing up. The acceleration of this trend in the next 25 years has consequences not only for our relationship with technology, but for our relationship to each other, to our collective ability to confront the crises we're facing and to make the world a better place.
The internet's adolescence was filled with late nights, loud music, junk food, indiscriminate dating and trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. Well, now it's grown up, and what it grew up to be is a place where our online and our offline lives have merged. The qualities we care most about offline are being increasingly reflected in our experiences online.
Adulthood is a time when our lives become about curating, selecting, saying no more often than we say yes, deciding what we really value, what's really important to us. Increasingly, that's exactly how people will be using the internet as well. Among all the random searching, something new has emerged: a search for greater meaning.
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Where we carry that search over the course of the next quarter century is both our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity. We are living in a golden age of engagement, with more information at our fingertips than previous generations could even imagine.
And with this great power comes great responsibility. Even though we may be dazzled by the latest apps and features and possibilities that make up our brave new digital media universe, we must remember that each of these tools is only useful in as much as it can be harnessed in the service of doing good -- making connections, starting conversations, telling stories, helping others.
As Milan Kundera wrote, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." For all our cutting-edge technology, the problems we face are not so new -- from war and diseases to leaders with high IQs making terrible decisions.
In the next 25 years, the internet's evolution must move us closer to an online version of what America's founding fathers called "a more perfect union", with real consequences for our offline lives -- a global conversation that enables us to tap into the power of new ideas and technologies to confront age-old problems, by fulfilling our needs for more truth, more transparency and more wisdom.
More from Wired's Web at 25 series
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- Marc Andreessen: embed the internet
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- Mikko Hypponen: government surveillance
- Joi Ito: 'it's a living, evolving organism'
- Nigel Shadbolt: augmented intelligence
- Keren Elazari: biocomputing mechanisms
- Vint Cerf: internet of things
- Nick D'Aloisio: natural language
- Ze Frank: 8 things to expect next
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
