ECT and the Internet

We've also spent a fair amount of time discussing networks, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. We learned that the Internet is just a network of networks that joins people together. It's a connection of people through computers, since at the end of the day, it's the people who send things to one another. Communications is really a discipline, not just a technology.

The Internet has pulled us out of a two-dimensional world, where we are no longer bound by geographic constraints - our physical address has become our IP address.

Our instructor provided some figures during class to show the differences in the adoption of a technology. Here is the time it took a technology from the first available product to adoption by at least 50 million people:

Radio: 38 years
TV: 13 years
Internet: 4 years

The point? ECT's are accelerating at a rapid pace, and we need to be prepared for new ones to be developed all the time. We're only using a fraction of the fiber optic cables that we laid around the world, so we have room to do much more. We need to anticipate what's coming and embrace it.