Happy Juneteenth!

Sunday is 140th Anniversary of the Juneteenth Celebration and (because I'm forced to) it has really made me think about the Internet.

Juneteenth celebrates the day that news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached Galveston, Texas and the last group of slaves. The date was June 19, 1865 - two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation became law!

Now, let's contrast that with the Michael Jackson verdict - obviously news of much less importance. The verdict was read at approximately 5:15 pm and sadly, I heard it live on streaming video as my entire office sat in rapt attention. At 5:55 pm, I walked into class and asked who had heard the verdict. Everyone had.

Amazing! Sunstein says we are losing our sense of community because we don't have shared events, but just 140 years ago the largest shared event of their lifetime took two and half years to reach everyone. With the Internet, even minor and largely unimportant events like the Jackson trial have become shared experiences.

So, to review:
1865 = 29 months to hear the news of a lifetime
2005 = immediate access to news I will forget tomorrow
Sunstein = still wrong