For my Survey of Interactive Media class at MTSU we were tasked to individually choose our top five most important moments in tech history! Mine are listed below:
5. OpenAI Releases Chat GPT
I believe that this moment in history is one that is heralding life changing technologies to come. I think the largest discoveries and changes that will come from AI research have not happened yet, but are on the horizon. Twenty years from now we’ll look back and say that the release of Chat GPT was what started it all and brought it into the public eye. This makes the list not because of what has already happened, but because of what may come in the near future.
4. Launch of The Google Search Engine
Google has changed how we interact with digital media to the point where we even use the name of the company as a synonym for looking things up. It introduced the idea of an algorithm and of search engine optimization. The company basically has a monopoly in the realm of search engines and has gone on to acquire and create things that the internet would feel unrecognizable without.
3. Steve Jobs Introduces the iPhone
The iPhone was the first smartphone in the way we think of smartphones today. This technology let us keep the entire world in our pockets and was an all in one device that could do anything from search the web to send messages to play games. Smartphones changed how we interact with digital media and the world around us.
2. Dot Com Bubble Bursts
The ballooning and subsequent bursting of the dot com bubble set the stage for the online landscape we see today. Startups failed and emphasis returned to free user created content. Companies that would go on to be giants survived or started right after the bubble burst. This also set the stage for the rise of social media.
1. The World Wide Web is Proposed
Reflection
I found it very difficult to narrow down my list of possible events to just five. I considered including the creation of the game pong, the ENIAC, the step reckoner, and even the abacus as all of these were big moments in tech history. Ultimately I decided to go with more recent historical moments that I had personally seen the direct effects of. I was born in 2001 and grew up playing flash games and watching my parents play World of Warcraft (Thursday was raid night. I can recall the other people my parents played with thinking it was so adorable to hear my tiny voice cheering them on!) I saw the early internet after the bursting of the dot com bubble throughout my childhood. I don’t remember (and can hardly fathom) a world without google. Some of my formative memories are of watching Markiplier videos on YouTube, and I remember being mystified by the touchscreen on my childhood best friend’s ipod touch. I’ve grown up in a world where we were just learning how to live with the fact that we can carry the world around in the palms of our hands, and I’m expecting to enter the workforce at a time where things are being revolutionized by AI, whether this will be positive or negative is still to be seen. When I spoke to my classmates we all had different lists, but fairly quickly came to the consensus that we were all correct, and also all wrong. No one can really say what was most important, but that’s what makes tech history so fascinating.