27 club : How our relationship with internet has changed the society

6 Aug, 1991: The day when Tim Berners Lee launched the first website of the internet world!

Ref: Link to the first wesbite and it's history

Coincidently I was born on the same day. The launch had nothing to do with me but knowing that I am as old as the internet got me to think.

The internet world that we see today(the World Wide Web) has turned 27. Welcome to the 27 club.

The people who joined 27 club(turned 27 recently), we grew in, err. grew with this internet world for my entire life and have a very special relationship with it.

This relationship between the people and the internet, is not only interesting, but it has also become the basis of many changes in our life at the fundamental level.

The most interesting and the only constant thing in this relationship is: Change

The 27 club is all about change

The change has spread out of this relationship. To other relationships, to other interactions.

Level 1

The changes at first, look simple such as

1. How we communicate to friends, family, colleagues, and strangers! Changed!
   • Face->face to screen->face
   • Hands->typewriter to hands->touchscreen
2. How we look for information(about friends, about jobs, about business)! Changed!
   • Looking through books and newspapers to typing in searchbar
   • References from known person to reviews from strangers
   • Trusting a person for the information to trusting a webpage for the info

Level 2

What's more interesting is: these changes have compounded into the change in

• The way we experience relationships
• The way we experience career
• The way we look at the world

e.g.
We know about other people and they know about us more than they would have earlier, thanks to social media. No more waiting to meet new people for dating, friendship, and career through dating apps, social media, and professional networks. It's now easy to know about events in a different country, miles away, on top of that you may get to know what Trump thinks about that specific event. Earlier there were few ways to verify if a piece of information was the truth or not.

Level 3

And the furthermore interesting thing is that these changes have compounded into the change in

• Desires
• Goals
• Behaviours and habits
• Understanding of the physical world around us
• The actions we take

e.g.
Test 1: Ask your parents or an older friend, what did they desire from their bosses, from their government, from their relationships, from themselves when they were 27, you will see the difference. Ask them about what they thought of society when they were 27, compare your perception.
Test 2: Remove the internet completely from your life for 60 days and see if your behavior/habits/perception of the world change. Speaking from my experience, it does, a lot.

These changes are not quite intuitive. The 27 club has grown with it.

As we grow older, we are moving towards a point, where these new behaviors will dominate and more new ones will emerge.

One thing which hasn't changed is

Most of our waking life has been and will be about work

This is why the most interesting change to understand and watch out for is

• The change in the way we work
  • We are automating more and more tasks that were done by humans earlier
  • New ways of standardizing communication and making it easy, meaningful, fast, and trustworthy
  • New expectations from career, from our work relationships
  • Different work and new styles of work

To make better choices/decisions, we all need to be mindful of this relationship between people and the internet. Nurturing this relationship, at the forefront is

• People who are automating the communication between the two worlds(cyber and physical) - developers
• People that support developers to do this - digital entrepreneurs, designers, and many others

Here, I leave you wondering
What are these new expectations from career and work relationships?
What are these new styles of work?

Share your views and do share it with your friends to know their views

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