For thousands of years women and men with great minds and poetry and song in their hearts have struggled to communicate their feelings and thoughts to others over distance and time. They have drawn elk and buffalo on cave walls, crafted clay tablets and fired intricately detailed pottery, carved wood and stone, penned elaborate scrolls and tomes and built great cities and monuments which carry their messages to us out of the past.
Late in the last century we discovered and harnessed the use of wavelengths of light too short to be seen by the human eye. Radio and television reached more people in less time and at less expense than any media before them. We loved it. We wanted more and we wanted it faster.
And now we have the World Wide Web. Never before have so many people had a truly immediate GLOBAL voice at such low cost in time, effort and capital. We have achieved the dream of those countless men and women before us. Each of us on the web have a voice that the world can hear.
From somewhere the cave-painters look on as we dance around the glow of our terminals, and they pity us. What we communicate has become as intangible and void of substance as the electrons through which we communicate it. We have acquired the global voice and have forgotten what we wanted to say. Paintings telling of the life-defining importance of the struggle to acquire food and shelter, following the herds in migration, hopes for good hunting and fear and wonder at the power of the natural world have become "I don't like beets".
