A few minutes ago, I wrote "I can't believe it's Wednesday". Actually, it just seemed like a few minutes ago - it was last Wednesday. Time is doing its thing again ...
But this time, I'm writing about time passing as it applies to the internet.
You see, a few weeks ago we had a letter from the local art institute. They wanted one of the principals of TSDG to advise them on their web design syllabus for the following year. Their letter started by saying "the internet has changed a lot in the last ten years".
First was the argument about who was going to go to this meeting. No, we weren't all fighting to go - no-one really had the time but what can you do? In the end, thanks to AR and I being on very tight deadlines, it was decided that AJH should be the one - on the proviso that I supplied him with a cheat sheet.
So I sat down to write the cheat sheet and pondered that introductory sentence "the internet has changed a lot in the last ten years". That was the spark that lot the fire.
I immediately listed a total of twelve significant things that had happened in the internet world, not in the last ten years but in the last twenty four hours. All those things effectively 'changed' the internet in some way.
Now this was a couple of weeks ago, and on my timescale, that's a long time. So I can't for the life of me remember what they were. Dear reader, all two of you, you know what my memory is like. But I can tell you that in the last twenty four hours there have been security concerns about geo-location tagging, that WordPress has some exciting new plugins, that the Puma phone will be solar powered, that there is another bunch of statistics about how Facebook rules the world (shouldn't that be Google?) ... amongst many other things.
Phew.
To get back to the art institute for a moment, how can students keep up? Maybe things are different now but when I was a student, any spare moments were filled by drinking beer, partying (although it hadn't become a verb at that time), cavorting with the opposite sex and toying with the occasional strange cigarette. (And before you start, this was in the UK in much more liberated times. It was legal. Well, legal-ish).
Student's today don't have that luxury. Their tutors aren't going to teach them about this stuff. (I'm a believer in the saying 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach.")
By the time today's students get home after a hard day slaving over a hot keyboard, and they've caught up with Facebook, updated their LinkedIn status, had a fumble around Twitter and read all the latest tech newsletters they've subscribed to, it's three o'clock in the morning.
We'll be lucky to have another generation at this rate.
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