What do we have here, in our present day and age, which enables all these powerful technologies and personal tools that we talk about? What is the main change in society, at a great historical moment, now, that will be remembered as a great turning point, a watershed?
A New Earth
Our momentous moment is much more than just a range of new devices and technologies. People on this planet have always communicated, played games, traveled and so on.
Those sorts of things don’t change over time much. Deep changes don’t happen in what people do, but how they do it. Over time, our awareness of what we do, and why, can shift. This is the way trend-watchers and some technologists interpret history.
One area where this change is expressed clearly is in the human race’s conception of the planet earth itself. We always had some idea of terra firma, and yet ever since NASA landed men on the moon, that image changed dramatically.
Great astronomers like Carl Sagan have pointed out that shift: a shift in humanity’s understanding of their home within the universe. With those incredible first images of the earth, taken from the moon, humans had their first ever look at the very planet on which they lived.
New Basis of Technology
We might say that technology was changing radically at the same time as our picture of the world was changing. Modern digital inventions were being created, and a few decades after the lunar mission, the Internet was born at a simple stage (not yet with the Web added to it, for use by the general public).
At the same time as humanity had gained a powerfully cohesive image of its home planet, its escalating sciences and (some would say out of control) technology were threatening to blow it up!
But a profound shift was already taking place in the degree to which people all over the world were sharing their cultures and concerns, through modern media like television, film and music.
The Web has continued that trend, making sharing ever more possible. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, a kind of landmark in human communication history, basically consolidated and focused this major trend.
Where We Are Now
These days, far beyond the basic technologies that have made physical life so much easier, humanity uses virtual technology that has created another sphere of life, wherein great amounts of experimentation, art, communication, collaboration and fun can happen without much limitation.
It all started in our imagination! This great moment in human history, arguably, kicked off with a great boost for the global mind, or ‘collective intelligence’.
It wasn’t as if children all starting doing quantum physics, however — the change actually showed up in simple things like playing video games, actually. Meanwhile science fiction encouraged people to think out of the box.
Strange as it may seem, for instance, if we play at Classy Casinos online or any other popular Web-powered games we are experiencing something that could only be available after the progress we have discussed above — it’s proof of a new way to live and play on earth.