After graduating from Rutgers College with a degree in English literature and few prospects for earning a living writing poetry, I landed my first reporting job in 1971 at The Courier-News in New Jersey. Eleven years later, I joined USA TODAY and covered the Justice Department and the CIA. It was, in journalistic parlance, a pretty sweet beat.
But then late one night in 1995, lost in the clickstream of the Web on my brand new Mosaic browser, I came across a Wired article that would eventually persuade me to leave that pretty sweet beat.
What first caught my interest was the article’s sci-fi-sounding headline: “A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain.” Even back in ’95 it was pretty clear that the globe could definitely use a brain, so I read on. The story was about a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a philosopher and paleontologist whose prophetic writings date back to the 1920s.
“Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness,” said the article’s writer, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg. “It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires.”
Teilhard, as Kreisberg observed, had envisioned the Web more than a half-century before it arrived.
Over time, as I thought about what I had read, I became convinced that that the future of journalism was elsewhere. Namely, it was online. So later that year I managed to talk my way into a job at the fledgling dotcom side of the paper, what is now USATODAY.com.
I pitched the idea of spending a couple months, as part of a special project, pulling together the technology stories that were scattered in different parts of the paper into one online technology section. Lucky for me, there was a huge amount of money being invested in online enterprises at the time – and that translated into some hefty advertising revenue for our newborn Tech section. Therefore, I was asked if I wanted to stay.
I weighed the possibility of actually getting paid to surf the Web – for about a split second – and then accepted the new assignment. More important, I wanted to have a front-row seat in on the world-transforming changes about to happen. I retired from USA TODAY in 2012, after serving stints as a deputy managing editor and video team lead. I’m now an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., teaching digital skills and documentary video production.
The Web’s development has been quite a thing to watch over the years. Look around. Consider the vast knowledge that’s now so easily accessible and the social networking that goes on ceaselessly across the planet. Though the going may seem rough at times, sure looks like we’re headed toward what Teilhard might have meant by a “thinking layer,” doesn’t it?