Today on my way back home, I heard a bit of a conversation between a teen and an mid-old age woman. They both don't know each other, yet the boy really warmed up to her conversation. I wasn't near enough to catch a lot, but they did bring up something about the convenience of the Internet.
It made me think about what a teacher said that Lee Kuan Yew said about the air con. That it was possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century. Then I thought about it, and despite the air con's longer running history, the Internet probably did better.
The modern air con was invented around the early 1900s and entered homes in around 1950. It helped to regulate temperature and humidity in an enclosed space, helping workforces combat heat that is detrimental to productivity. It also helps us manage seasons of heat.
The Internet started around the late 1950s and was originally intended to be an information array for the US to fight against Russia's technological advances. Nobody knew it would become such a worldwide phenomenon 40 years later. It improved information transfer to the point of literally having information at one's fingertips.
Both inventions have made great contributions to the modern world today, but I'll go into why I think the Internet is no contest compared with the air con. I could start by saying that the air con brought more people indoors, which created other problems like sick building syndrome, but the same argument could go to the Internet as well, so I won't use this argument.
Imagine two parallel modern-day universes; one without the Internet, one without the air con. The one without the Internet would just be like today, at the workplace, there may be no email, but there probably will be in an Intranet. Not much will be different, except for the obvious lack of information each people from each country might suffer from. Possibly the only good thing that comes from this is that you don't face the little annoying things that come along with the Internet, like annoying people (or people acting annoying) or chain mails and false information. You don't have to manage viruses and all, you may spend more time outside or watching TV since there's not much point using the computer except for work or playing games (by yourself, which is a boring and antisocial thing to do), which is probably a good thing for the well-being of human health.
Then we look at a world without the air con. We would have open windowed environments instead of enclosed spaces. Generally we would all die of heat here in Singapore, but of course, dying is just a figure of speech since our ancestors survived without air conditioning. However, the concept of information at your fingertips just overwhelms the concept of climate control. With the Internet, we have super fast data transfer in the form of emails, instant messaging, websites; and data retrieval from search engines, wikis... I wouldn't be here sharing this information right now in this alternate universe. It gave a new generation an easier, earlier and more detailed exposure to different cultures, genres; opening each others' minds up, helping everyone to understand each other from different nations. Besides, I'm guessing with all these things encouraging people to use computers more, someone would eventually have thought of controlling climate in a room, then the Internet would help out in information retrieval and dissemination.
This is why; despite the Internet's relatively young history, I think that it is no comparison for the air con. Lee Kuan Yew probably said that a long time ago, so he probably took back his earlier words already (or my teacher might be vastly misinformed).
The random ramblings of a crazy mind.
