How casually we take it all

Writing for the Observer, Britain's Sunday newspaper, author John Naughton reminds us how Gutenberg's invention of movable type had unanticipated side effects. It would "undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood." But who knew?

And today we have Tim Berners-Lee's gift to humanity, the World Wide Web. As Naughton writes:

"The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments to rent on Craigslist .... And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger."

Indeed. We are in the midst of a social change so vast it is beyond our comprehension.

And we are deeply addicted.

Lightning visited my home last Thursday night, laying waste to a couple of devices that hadn't been invented a decade ago (a wireless router and a cable modem). My kids would have been happier if they'd been tossed overboard mid-Atlantic. The telephone and television are trivial by comparison. Panic set in. McLuhan was right when he said invention is the mother of necessities.

The Internet has become central to our consciousness. We no longer have to know facts, just how to Google or Wikipedia them. Our friends and relatives and photographs and memories are all there. The Internet has become an extension of our minds, and we take it for granted, until it suddenly disappears.