Submitted by Katie Hellmuth on | 0 Comments
Earlier this morning, Sabina sent this link to me as a "funny morning link" from dlisted.com. It's a clip from The Today Show circa 1994, with the hosts asking each other "What is the Internet?" At that time, many of us were exploring chat rooms and pondering the crazy horror of never leaving the house again just in case ordering groceries online became a possibility.
What struck me about this clip was the helpless, yet fascinated attempts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric made at trying to define the Internet, and what the @ symbol means (when used in what is now known as an email address). A producer from behind the camera describes the Internet as a way to communicate, a giant bulletin board. Bryant goes on to explain how the Internet helped people communicate during a recent 1994 CA earthquake, especially after the phone lines went dead.
Sound familiar? Yes. During almost every uprising or revolution that takes place now days, people communicate and coordinate over the Internet, via Twitter. One of the early examples was protests in Iraq in 2009 after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election over opponent Mir Hossein Moussavi, and the people thought the election was rigged.
Here is CommonCraft.com explaining Twitter in plain English:
