Warmonger or Peacebringer?
So much has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It underlines how much we have to learn from our European neighbours...
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 10 Sep 2010
There are numerous signs that mark generational change. Many of them are technological, indicating a quantum leap: latterly from ‘personal stereos’ to ipods, emails to tweets, the coming of social networking, the arrival of the first genomic medicines, widespread adoption of the internet for shopping…
What distinguishes them all is the almost-immediate assumption by the coming generation that it was always this way.
Those who have just taken their Leaving Certificates are of the post-digital generation. And in due course they will encounter what some geneticists and neurologists are calling H2, the next evolutionary stage of humanity. Some of them, for sure, will be alive to greet the next century. Their world is utterly unlike that of their parents.
Still, look back even twenty years and you’ll find just how much change we have all embraced without really noticing. If you’d told a farmer in a field in rural Ireland in 1990 that he could call his daughter backpacking in Australia on a tiny portable phone he’d have thought you were mad.
Likewise, if you’d predicted how almost everything would revolve around the internet in 2010 you’d have been dissed as a crazy dreamer.
Mad as it might seem to many of the Leaving Certers now contending with their CAO offers, some people actually remember when the internet was, like, actually beginning?
There you go. It was 20 years ago, come September, when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau made a key proposal to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology.
Nobody adopted their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet in 1990. It took another five years for the project to really lift off. But in 2010? Well, now we take it for granted. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine what we’d do without it. Just watch yourself if the broadband fails…
Twenty years ago there was far more speculation about the implications of a mammoth political development, the reunification of Germany. The Iron Curtain, symbolised for many by the Berlin Wall, had collapsed. Well, from this distance we can see that German reunification precipitated a couple of crucial changes.
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