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1.
The age of instant communication
The world has developed an
amazing ability to store information and make it available instantly in different forms to
almost anyone. That ability is revolutionizing business, education, home life, employment,
management and virtually everything else we take for granted.
Our homes will reemerge as vital centers of
learning, work and entertainment. The impact of that sentence alone will transform our
schools, our businesses, our shopping centers, our offices, our cities - in many ways our
entire concept of work.
Our ability to communicate is one of our key human
traits.
Most scientists say the world has existed for 4,500
million years,1 that humans in somewhere near their present form
have been here for maybe two million years, and as "modern humans" for 35,000 to
50,000 years. Yet our ancestors - whatever arguments exist over their origins - did not
invent any form of writing until 6,000 years ago.
It took another 2,000 years before they created the
first alphabet - the unique concept that eventually enabled all knowledge to be recorded
by rearranging only 26 symbols. But not until the 11th century AD did the Chinese start
printing books. And it was not until 1451 that German inventor Johannes Gutenburg printed
the first European book: transforming our ability to store and communicate knowledge by
making the printed word available to millions. "Before Gutenberg, there were only
about 30,000 books on the entire continent of Europe. By 1500, there were more than 9
million."2
Not until the last hundred-odd years did we start to
speed up the process: the first typewriter in 1872, the first telephone message in 1876,
the first typesetting machine in 1884, silent movies in 1894, the first radio signals in
1895, talking movies in 1922, infant television in 1926 and the computer microprocessor
and pocket calculator in 1971. Since then the communications revolution has exploded.
The world is becoming one gigantic
information exchange. By 1988 a single fiber optic "cable" could
carry 3,000 electronic messages at once. By 1996: 1.5 million. By 2000: 10 million.3
In a typical year the world produces over 800,000
different book-titles.4 If you read one a day, it would take you well over 2,000 years to complete them
all. But what if you could automatically select only the information you want, when you
want it, and have it fed to you through
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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