From This Day Forward
The future starts now.
The future starts now.
When I was a kid, I thought about what life would be like when I was grown up. The beginning of a new millennium seemed the most significant of all the milestones I looked forward to.
For years, science fiction viewed this new millennium as the fruition of human potential and ingenuity. The future held the promise of flying cars, cities contained in a single skyscraper, and the eradication of all disease, war, famine, and heartache. Prognostications ranged from the fantastic to the humdrum.
Now we find ourselves living in that future, and it seems so commonplace. Great strides have been achieved in technology, medicine, and other things that have made the world better. It’s hard to be amazed by things that have become part of your life almost without your realizing it.
Children often allow you to see the world in new ways. Sometimes, you end up sounding like that old codger you remember from when you were a kid, using phrases such as, “When I was your age, we didn’t have ____.” Fill in the blank with your favorite advancement: VCRs, personal computers, cell phones, fax machines, CDs, ATMs, UPC scanners, the Internet, moon landings, and so on. All these things were born in my lifetime. Each moment, from then to now, has been filled with incredible inventions, technological strides, and the stuff of the future.
This New Year’s, I share many apprehensions with you. I worry about war, protecting my children from harm, earning enough to cover expenses, and making a positive difference in the world. I am also filled with the hope that I will continue to grow, learn, take important chances, and find ways to communicate better than I have before.
The only constant is change. The world will continue to change this year. We will ride the economic roller coaster while the new online infrastructure fully defines itself. We will continue to ponder online marketing approaches. Many of us will fret about eventualities that won’t even happen. We’ll see good times and bad. We’ll continue to have hope for the future.
As we begin 2002, I will make it my task to provide you, loyal reader, with information that can help your life. I will attempt to avoid gloom-and-doom and I-told-you-so scenarios in favor of a perspective that will allow you to access the information you need to do your job more efficiently and maybe make your world a better place. Together, we’ll explore the potential of online marketing and what can be done to make it better and more effective. We’ll consider different streaming technologies and find approaches that offer solutions to problems.
I expect that by the time 2002 reaches its end, we’ll have explored many new facets of our changing world. We will have witnessed new advances in technology, breakthroughs in medicine, and potential for good. We will also see results of bad planning and abuses of technology. With both good and bad comes wisdom. It’s this wisdom that drives us into the future.