What the H*** Happened in 2007?
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the latest book by James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian Digital Age (Zondervan). You can order from Amazon HERE.
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We call it the digital revolution, but in truth it is the latest in a line of three industrial revolutions. With each, the invention of a technology brought about fundamental societal change.
The first industrial revolution started around 1760 in Britain. It was fueled by the invention of the steam engine, which enabled new manufacturing processes, which in turn led to the creation of factories.
The second industrial revolution, approximately a century later, was characterized by mass production in new industries such as oil, steel, and electricity. Inventions during this period included the lightbulb, telephone, and internal combustion engine.
In the 1960s, the third industrial revolution began with the invention of the semiconductor and led to the inventions of the personal computer and the internet, marking the digital revolution.
But it is only of late that the digital revolution has made its impact most keenly felt, and many missed the moment it descended upon our world like a tsunami. As Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, “What the h*** happened in 2007?”
Friedman makes the case that 2007 was one of the most significant pivotal years in all of human history—not simply because that was the year the iPhone was released but because of all the iPhone set in motion and all that came into play in a simultaneous way. Beyond the iPhone, in 2007, Facebook left college campuses and entered the wider world. Twitter was spun off. Google bought YouTube and launched Android. Amazon released the Kindle. And the number of internet users crossed one billion worldwide, becoming the fabric of our world.
All in 2007.
(Friedman neglected to note that also a little company called Netflix began streaming videos in 2007.)
With self-deprecating humor about his own earlier writings, specifically The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century that he began writing in 2004, he notes:
... when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error.
What set off the revolution that year, though, was without a doubt the iPhone. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone as little more than a combination of “three revolutionary projects” – a cellphone, an iPod, and a keyboardless handheld computer with internet connectivity – even he didn’t know what had been unleashed.
And make no mistake – the iPhone changed the world.
James Emery White
Sources
This has been an excerpt from James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian, Digital Age (Zondervan), order here.