Google
My initial thought was Google,
because it is the most visited website in the world, and the most effective
search engine to boot. Of course, in the arbitrary rules that I have set up,
you can only visit one website and its particular set of features – and so
while Google would be amazing in order to demonstrate to our 1920s comrades the
vast scope of the internet, once you’ve conducted an internet search and shown
them the pages and pages of ‘results’ there is little else you can do. Showing
Google to someone from ninety years ago is akin to showing someone from two
hundred years ago a Boeing 747 but not letting them see it fly.
Facebook
It would be really interesting to
see how long it took someone with no idea of the internet to get a grasp on the
basic features of Facebook. I suppose many people get a glimpse of this when
their parents’ sign up for an account – but at least the less-technologically
literate folk of our era have the benefit of some prior knowledge of what the
internet actually is and what it does. Show it to your average human from the
1920s, however, and see what they make of it. My prediction would be that they
would either be updating their status and liking people’s posts after barely
twenty minutes online or they’d curl into the foetal position on the floor,
quietly sobbing. Such is the wonderfully divisive nature of Facebook.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia seems like a mature,
sensible choice: it’s a wonderful demonstration of the democratic and malleable
nature of the internet and it contains the best approximation of our collective
knowledge as a species. You could set someone from the 1920s loose on Wikipedia
and let them research the past and future to their hearts’ content (I’m
allowing people to move around all the pages available in Wikipedia because,
unlike a Google search, they’re all part of the same website). Of course it
wouldn’t be long before they discovered the edit function and began ruining all
our carefully compiled knowledge, which also raises the important philosophic
question: if you go back in time and edit a Wikipedia page from the future,
will you actually edit history?
YouTube
If your mission is not to bring
education and the sum of human knowledge to the 1920s, but rather to show our
ancestors the lighter side of the internet, then perhaps you would direct them
to YouTube. No doubt a society that has only recently been exposed to the
moving picture would get a huge kick out of YouTube. Yes, Wikipedia could show
our forebears how an atomic bomb works or how to potentially avoid the conflict
in the Middle East, but with YouTube we could demonstrate to someone how
vicious Charlie can be when he goes on a biting rampage or what it looks like
when Katy Perry ejects whipped cream from her breasts. I get the feeling that
those videos might say more about our current society than any 10,000 word
Wikipedia article could.
Pornhub
As a natural aside to the YouTube
discussion, we’re kidding ourselves if we deny that at least one person would
choose to spend their amazing time travel journey by showing the 1920s just how
prevalent internet pornography is. However, considering the supposedly
debaucherous nature of the 1920s, they would probably take to Pornhub like a
duck to water. Assuming that there is a fairly stringent bandwidth limit on the
time travel journey (it’s hard enough to find a decent internet plan today, let
alone one that allows you to go back in time) one can only assume that anyone
who bought internet porn to the 1920s would be in for a short visit.
Twitter
If you think that people from the
1920s would have trouble with Facebook, it would probably be a violation of
human rights to show them Twitter. Seventy per cent of people alive today
struggle to understand it, just imagine how someone from the 1920s would react?
eBay
I wasn’t alive in the 1920s (are
you shocked?) but I imagine it would have been pretty time-consuming to buy
things: riding horses or taking primitive cars into the marketplace, selecting
produce and then paying actual money for it. If you’re ripped off, your only
recourse is either confronting the seller face to face (surely the number one
cause in the 1920s of receiving a pitchfork wound to the abdomen) or trying to
fob off the dodgy product to your neighbours. Depending on which country you
travelled back in time to, I imagine eBay would be quite popular (maybe not
Leninist Russia).
Nyan.cat
If you showed someone from the year
1922 nyan.cat and left them to it, by the time they reached 2012 again they
would have ‘nyaned’ for 2.84012334 × 109 seconds. They would then
proceed to hunt you down and beat you to death with a shovel while singing the
nyan song, which would provide you with a particularly unique epitaph for your
gravestone.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps the most interesting aspect
of this thought experiment is considering if the people from the 1920s could
make any sense of the internet at all. I suspect that they would grasp the
concept fairly quickly; after all they are only a generation removed from us
and certainly
not bumbling idiots. Having said that, the internet has had a remarkably
quick development, considering it was only widely adopted in a cultural sense
sometime in the early 1990s. It’s worth wondering, if the tables were shifted
and we received a time traveller from 2090, would the internet of the late
21st century be at all comprehendible to us?
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