"To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting." E. E. Cummings
For your next company ice breaker, play this game: “my first internet memory.”
It works best with a very diverse team of people. Ask everyone around the room to describe their first internet memory.
We played last night with multiple generations present.
Many Gen Z’s described their first internet memory as seeing a Youtube video for the first time. Others of us mentioned the sound of a dialup modem, the familiar “you got mail” of AOL, using a search engine for the first time, or sending a first email.
If you ask this question to young children, I assume they won’t be able to easily answer. There will be no memory of something so pervasive as ‘internet’. Like a fish being asked to describe water, they were born into it.
As technology progresses, IRL and virtual worlds merge a decade or two from now, will the idea of ‘internet memory” fade further to the point that there is no memory of being disconnected, separated from the vital flow of images, ideas, and connections: no blurring between Metaverse and mountains, no multiple worlds, and no multiple realities: just one unified experience with no memory of anything before it.
A Life of Wonder 
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