Untangling the Web/Conclusion

by the National Security Agency

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Conclusion

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The overall implications of the Internet for how we work and how we play are just beginning to be discussed and understood. The Internet is changing, or at the very least touching, people's lives in ways we have not imagined. I close with an example of the reach of the web. My 97-year-old aunt in South Carolina had a bit part in an obscure movie in 1989. Despite the fact that the movie has been largely forgotten, my aunt has an "Actress Filmography" in the Internet Movie Database. She, of course, was unaware of her Internet presence and was both thrilled and more than a little shocked to find that even she was "in cyberspace."

The point, of course, is that no one is out of reach of this powerful, invasive technology. We change the world with our technology and we, in turn, are altered by that same technology. It remains to be seen where our technology leads us, whether into an "endless frontier"^[1] or, more ominously, into a "cemetery of dead ideas."^[2]

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1. Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1945.
2. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (November 2005), p. 100.