July 22, 2000

Do you think...?

(A single person stands on stage, alternates between speaking normally and screaming at the top of her/his lungs. The transition occurs between screaming and speaking must take up as little time as possible.)

Do you think that in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues in Geneva first wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that would eventually become the World Wide Web, or in 1969 when one research team at UCLA tried to send to another team at Stanford the very first email message, do you think they were thinking:

"Maybe someday everyone will have cyberporn, and vicious worms, and spam, and overvalued dot coms, and Really Big Buttons That Don't Do Anything."

Do you think that in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries, when Paul Nipkow, J. L. Baird, and Vladimir Zworykin worked with image scanning disks and neon gas-discharge lamps to create and refine the technology of broadcasting moving pictures, do you think they were thinking:

"Maybe someday everyone will be able to see Smackdown and South Park and Full House and Alf and Boston Common and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionnaire and Studs."

Do you think that in the mid 19th century, when Guglielmo Marconi worked to extend Heinrich Hertz's parabolic mirror experiments in experiments to detect electromagnetic waves across space, eventually leading to the advent of radio, do you think he was thinking:

"Maybe someday everyone will be able to hear Dr. Laura and Stern and Imus and Rush and Liddy and morning zoos?"

Do you think when Alexander Graham Bell was racing against Elisha Gray to refine the harmonic telegraph into what would eventually become the telephone, do you think they were thinking:

"Maybe someday everyone will have phone sex and be bugged by telemarketers and slamming and the Jerky Boys and..."

Do you think that if we were to think a little bit more about what these scientists and engineers, full of dreams of using their inventions for improving the human condition and raising the cultural level of the world, even just a little--do you think that we could improve the human condition and raise the cultural level of the world, even just a little?

Do you think?

CURTAIN

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