UKC

A couple of hundred years ago it would have taken many weeks of travelling before news of such events like the Battle Trafalgar to hit our shores and news papers.

Now today we can wander around globe, take photos or write on a blog and have the world know about it the moment we press the Return Key.

In reply to The Lemming:

Thoreau was saying almost exactly the same things, but about the Telegraph.

... in 1854.

CJ.

In reply to The Lemming:

Not just hundreds of years ago.

The WWW (World Wide Web) is going to be 17 years old on August 6th, but access to it on the scale we have now is probably about 5 years old, in terms of easy access - assuming you can afford a computer, phone line, and broadband subscription.

In reply to The Lemming:

Actually it probably took less than a couple of days.

I remember my father telling me that when he was a boy just after the First war, when he went to Tynecastle and Hearts were playing a team from a mining community the miners used to bring pigeons with them so that they could send the score back home as it happened...

You'll also have heard of the Fiery Cross where simple signals could be sent over areas of many miles very quickly almost instantaneously.

But yes I see your point.

I'd also wonder though about the permanency of a lot of this information. Cave men may not have written very much, but there's not a lot that beats carving information into rocks if you want your message to last.

In reply to Dominion:

There's a few of us around who have used it since (At least very nearly) after it's inception. I remember browsing the web in 1993. It was very small then... It's rather nice to now work at the place it was invented...

In reply to The Lemming:
moore's law innit... i was amazed as a kid, pulling fresh news off a telex machine for my (journalist) dad in the 80's. searching for stories on the net seems like a good development; loads faster and loads more accessible to people not as privileged as some journo's brat too... pick your sources and form your own opinion too, not just reuter's or AP's...