I've begun to start thinking of the Internet as a sort of human version of whale-speak.
Consider that whales communicate over vast distances, communicating information such as who they are, what they're doing, and where they are, broadcasting that information to all of any whale within hearing distance in the vast reverberating oceans of the world. They may be telling stories, for all we know, and we're missing epic tales because we don't actually speak whale. Nonetheless, humans have learned some very interesting things about whalespeak.
So, with the myriad web-sites and on-line social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, humans are immediately broadcasting their random thoughts and locations, sights and smells to everyone
within communication range of the Internet.
It's our form of whale speak. It may not have the elegance of whalesong, but it has the relevance. The transmissions the whales are sending may even be far richer than our transmissions, for they do have a sensory range beyond ours and they could find things interesting about the world that we hardly see on a regular basis, so their transmissions could contain thoughts and concepts outside our capability to grasp.
But, we can each of us reach out into the world and instantly transmit our thoughts and concepts and pictures and details about our immediate environments to anyone in the world who can reach out and experience the Internet.
There are a lot of whales out their speaking and they can listen to who they want. It's the same on the Internet. Billions of voices speaking, and we can listen to who we want.
Granted, there are a lot of people in the unfortunate position of not being able to access the Internet due to financial, regional, or social circumstances and perhaps they are blocked by a security wall the size of China. The first Great Wall of China's marketing has always been that you can see it from space. Aliens could fly up to the planet and clearly see that somebody was saying to somebody: STAY OUT
Now, whether or not aliens have landed here and whales have violated the Temporal Prime Directive by boarding Captain James T. Kirk's stolen Klingon vessel is irrelevant.
But now there is a "Great Wall of China II." This one could be marketed: You Can't See It, But It's There.
I think technology levels go up when communication levels reach whalespeak. Technologically speaking, at some point in the past decade, we reached whalespeak.
It's at times beautiful. It's at times fun. It's very often just babble. At times, it's a complete waste of time and at times it's a Mega God Send.
"Oh, a pod of orca swimming down the straits, you say? OKay, we'll swim around that."
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