We're all time travelers, we just happen to be moving into the future one second at a time. So it's pleasantly shocking to look back and see how far we've come. The two videos below make that clear. The first, from College Humor, portrays how the TV show "24" would have looked if it had been made in 1994. It illustrates the gradual nature of radical change. For example, 20 years ago we had:
- Dial up, but not broadband
- Pagers, but not cell phones
- Email, but you couldn't send large files
- Printed documents, but not on regular paper (and the screeching sound chased you from the room)
College Humor: "24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot"
The second video, from Amazon.com, shows the exponential nature of small changes. New innovations don't just make one thing better, they set off a series of chain reactions in other areas of life. If you have two innovations, but impact is, at a minimum, squared. The .com age brought us thousands of innovations, with the result being a totally different sense of what "normal" is. (Listen for where the ad says "And when we build you something new you can expect everything to change a little more.")
Amazon.com Kindle Ad: "Normal Just Begs to be Messed With"
