Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Status:
"From 31 to 41 Countries Visited: )"
(set 9 days ago)
4,640 posts, read 13,920,579 times
Reputation: 4052
When you say “in the world today” I assume you are talking about the past 10 to 20 years.
If that is the case, I would say that the greatest revolutionary occurrences during that time period are:
1. The continued increase of globalization.
2. Higher quality, more varied, and much more easily accessible Science/Technology products, especially with Computers, but with some other things too.
3. Probably more versatility and individual freedoms for people's lives in more countries and more places.
If you're speaking in terms of straight revolution/protest then hands down the Arab Spring of last year was the most significant event that occurred in the past year. OWS can try and take credit and claim for their movement around the world but the Arab Spring really set off a revolution throughout the Mediterranean and globally, it really set the precedents.
Intergenerational discontinuity. One generation has no connection, socially or intellectually, with another generation. The age group from 12-25 has no contact with the age group from 25-40, and regards the existince of an over-40 age group as a rumor. There is no communications between two age groups, and not even a common language that is mutually inteillgible. Each age group is sealing itself off from all the others.
This is an accelerating process, and so far we are seeing only the first phases of it. The sad result will be that the knowledge and wisdom acquired by one generation will no longer be passed along to the next, which will need to keep reinventing the wheel.
Intergenerational discontinuity. One generation has no connection, socially or intellectually, with another generation. The age group from 12-25 has no contact with the age group from 25-40, and regards the existince of an over-40 age group as a rumor. There is no communications between two age groups, and not even a common language that is mutually inteillgible. Each age group is sealing itself off from all the others.
This is an accelerating process, and so far we are seeing only the first phases of it. The sad result will be that the knowledge and wisdom acquired by one generation will no longer be passed along to the next, which will need to keep reinventing the wheel.
This sounds like its particular to your experience, I highly doubt intergenerational interactions in most countries have changed all that radically, and it certainly hasn't been the case in my own under twenty five life. Seems like generations always more or less socialized with themselves, but interacted with each other about as much as now. In fact, if anything parents seem to be a bit more involved with their children now than in the hand off past as family size has shrunk, we have more people learning from their elders in schools now, and they do so for longer, and generations still interact with each other at work.
I think the single most important fact of the modern age is falling birth rates across the globe. This has radical implications for the directions developing and developed countries will take, and it completely dictates how economies will evolve, and how governments will function. Demography = destiny.
Internet penetration and the rise of algorithms for everything. It's completely changed how news and information spread, the way that people gather and interact, and how the understanding of the world works. It's provided an incredible cat and mouse game for vital information around the world. The world wide web project, started by a researcher at cern, which directed networked information from small closed in groups to one navigable with a standardized shared protocol has changed things to an incredible extent in so many ways and forms that it's impossibly complex to understand.
There's a surfeit of research and proof of how it's changed everything. Some examples are the way that local businesses have been able to proliferate because the buy-in for making people aware of their business has moved away from the massive chains that have the immense advertising budgets to leverage awareness of their business. There are huge academic paper repositories that allow researchers from around the world and hobbyists who have great incremental improvements to join in on the dialogue towards certain goals. There are massive analytic engines to tell us about different sociological circumstances around the world. There is a huge dissemination of knowledge about music, films, television shows, cultural practices, recipes, etc. to every corner of the world and socioeconomic bracket rather than having industry and hobbyist bits of information catering to just a tiny reach of people. There is the massive influx of pornography from around the world which has massively changed sex practices and gender relations all around the world. There is a huge databasing of information about different physiological and mental conditions allowing for a whole slew of medical practices to become widespread. There are massive shifts of financial assessments for companies around the world that are now put in flux on a microsecond to microsecond basis. The are machine and human-assisted translation works for both the written word and the context for accessing information from different cultures. The world wide web has so massively changed nearly every facet of life from the personal to the global that it's ridiculous to believe anything else has created anywhere near the kind of sea change that's happened.
The frightening thing is how quickly we became so completely accustomed to it infiltrating so many parts of our life with (relatively) rarely any second thoughts. It was almost a completely incidental thing that we ended up with hypertext transfer protocol which was meant for rapid sharing of information between physicists, and it's now become the de facto way the world communicates.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 05-17-2012 at 10:36 PM..
To be honest I'm actually kind of sick about hearing about the Internet and the changes it's made. Over 100 years ago, the telegraph system did the same thing, not quite to the complexity of the Net no, but it's nothing new.
To be honest I'm actually kind of sick about hearing about the Internet and the changes it's made. Over 100 years ago, the telegraph system did the same thing, not quite to the complexity of the Net no, but it's nothing new.
You get tired of it because it is actually everywhere. The telegraph is not--you do not use the telegraph every day. There is no back end processing of the information for a telegraph except for a single operator or two patching. The funny thing is, you probably hear about the internet all the time mostly through the internet.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
