4,000 days later

"Senior maverick" Kevin Kelly wrote a great piece for Wired magazine reflecting on just how much the Internet has changed the world in the past 10 years. He goes beyond the usual history, nostalgic musings and grass-roots futurist boosterism to point out that the most crucial innovations were social, not technological:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. ...

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.

As you may have guessed from that quote, another of Kelly's main points is how poorly everyone predicted the future direction of the "information superhighway" in 1995:

A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked a few hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month on the information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting, and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted. According to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in order): playing games, "just surfing," shopping -- the list ends with responsible activities like politics and banking.