Read Me in 2100 AD

It's pretty amazing to think about how fast the Net has developed into what it is today.  Sure, it took a good 50 years to get to this point from when it started as a government backup plan, but I'm talking about more like the last twenty or so, and how DOS evolved into the online experience we have today. In 1989-1990, I remember Dad owning a few DOS-based PCs that he used for Quicken 

and word processing and such.  Not much to them other than a command prompt and an 8-bit aquarium screensaver.  My cousins had something like a 2.4 k/s modem hooked up to their PC and ran a very basic net program from a company called Prodigy.  The computer wouldn't dial the server itself, so the line ran through a phone and you had to physically dial in the connection number 

yourself every time you wanted to connect.  The most I ever did with it was print out some inappropriate Mad Libs.  Come along about 3 years and me and my sister get our early Christmas present, a clunky desktop with Windows 3.1!!  It had its basic bevy of programs, from Grolier's Encyclopedia to File Manager, but its true feat was its ability to point at items on the screen with a mouse.  About 1995 was when our family first went online.  We had a 7.0k modem and a small company called Mindspring was our ISP, and even the computer could dial on its own now.  Netscape Navigator was the main browser we used, although its features were severely limited and page load times could sometimes take twenty or thirty minutes.  Mindspring didn't last, and was replaced by Juno and several other cheap ISPs.  By the time all this was happening, Microsoft was ready to release Windows 95, tho OS that really defined the 90's.  Our modem speeds increased to 14.4, then 56k, sites became more complicated, and public chats began popping up all over the Net.  I had my first personal e-mail address in 7th grade on hotmail.com, and chatted frequently on a long gone site called beseen.com.  But something was missing.  I had all my friends' email addresses, and we all had Angelfire accounts and would visit each other's homepages, but it was too hard to directly interact with several friends all at once.  Behold, AOL Instant Messenger.  Although it's still around, it no longer sports the crown it once did.  In the early 2000's, AIM dominated many a high-schoolers' afternoon, whereas teens would choose to chat with their friends online rather than just go hang out.  AIM also taught me that staying up until 4 AM was a good thing, a lesson that I still haven't managed to un-learn.  The fact that we had 'lightning-fast DSL' only made it that much better.  But it was only a few years until one by one all the regulars said BRB, put up away messages, and never came back.  Most moved on to text messages, some got busted on Napster.  The mobility of texting on a cell phone, however, eliminated need to sit around at home waiting in front of your monitor.  So now what?  It hasn't been long since the heyday of AIM, and it's only been 10 or so 

years since 'dot com' even became a household term.  Because handheld devices has advanced to the point where we can access mobile versions of Facebook and Yahoo, the new online trend is to combine it all into one big melting pot: a site where we can display every aspect of our lives for everyone to see; an online Me Generation, each with his own pictures, status updates, comment walls, etc.  You can instantly compile an album that contains all of the posted pictures of yourself and any given friend, and see all the comments that anyone had to say about them.  Sites like Wikipedia offer an enormous amount of information on all topics, each page compiled by users able to devote their time to completing such a database.  Some sites are social news networks that allow users to share updates from around the world amongst each other instantly.  Since wireless internet is available in most major areas, and in our homes, we can access all of these features any time, constantly connected, at access speeds unimagined just years ago.  Technology has come an amazingly long way, but advancements are increasing that much faster with the free flow of information.  

One must wonder: does it come at a price, that we may not yet know of?