How's Your "Way Back Machine" Working?

In case you've never visited the Way Back Machine, you may wish to do so, if only for nostalgic reasons, as long as we define nostalgia as a feeling that exists about only about things since the advent of the world wide web.

This is a non-profit effort to provide snapshots of the web as it existed in the recent past, before all the iterations and redesigns and erasures that are constantly remaking the electronic text and images at url after url.

So, occasionally, you can find the equivalent of an old online friend -- a page that you liked that has since disappeared.

That is a rather unsettling reminder about just how much our world has sped up, almost to the point that we can no longer be sure whether what we thought we saw -- or heard or read -- really existed, because it has since been deleted from the "place" we used to "go."

Besides this dilemma, my question is this: As we transition to the entirely digital future that so obviously awaits us, what about all that came before? Will history have essentially stopped somewhere around 1994, and started anew online?

Is this, possibly, a B.C./A.D. moment for humankind?

I believe it is.

When I watch my young children doing their homework, their research is usually confined to whatever can be found online. Yes, they also consult books, those endangered species that cover my walls, but 90% of what they need to find out to complete their assignments exists online, and that percentage is only going to grow.

At some point in the not too distant future, I suspect that non-digital information will be accessible only in libraries maintained by private universities and wealthy governments.

It is almost as if we are going way back in time to when books and manuscripts were a luxury reserved for the elite...while, at the same time, we are entering an age where anybody can find out just about anything about any subject by the simple act of keystroking an entry on Google.

To the credit of Google and other Internet companies, efforts are under way to scan books and other artifacts so they can be searched and located online. Some of my own books are available via Google Books, and I certainly do not mind.

It would be nice, of course, to get a little compensation, for the intellectual property rights that I apparently no longer possess.

But, since I wrote those books not so much to make money as to make a point, it's really okay.

Way back. Way back now only means 14 years, give or take, less than a quarter of my lifetime to date, but more than the entire lifetimes to date of my young children (aged 13, 11, and 9.)

I wonder if in the future they, and their peers, will begin to become curious about all that came before this marvelous, frightening, powerful moment we find ourselves in, a moment when technology fundamentally transforms reality, wiping away past barriers, and opening up unimaginable futures?

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