Geologists distinguish era (several hundred million years) from epoch (tens of millions of years) in scaling the history of our planet over time. Some theorists speculate that the Earth was more or less a large ocean or seascape out of which gigantic land masses emerged to form the more familiar landscape we see today. Similarly, the digital seascape in the early 1960′s was in large part, a single primitive ocean of email. Over the next twenty years, until the early 1990′s, islands of specialized technology or protocols emerged from the digital sea (AKA the Matrix) as distinct yet virtual text-based worlds such as Gopherspace, V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A., and W.A.I.S.. After 1989, one digital land mass, originally and somewhat audaciously referred to at the time as the World Wide Web, rose up to dominant and define our digital landscape. Today, no matter where we are on the surface of the Earth, we call it simply the Web or the Net. It has now so dominated our digital perspective and our collective psyche that we use it to “scale” Internet Time as Web 1.0, Web 2.0, etc.  Read more... (1004 words, 13 images, estimated 4:01 mins reading time)