Science in the Triangle

My husband Alan has been thinking a lot lately about the fact that our daughters will not know a world in which you mainly learned about your place in it through personal relationships, newspapers, magazines, television, radio and books.

Both were born after the Internet began to challenge established means of communication and public discourse.

So a few days after I lost my job as a newspaper reporter, Alan asked me what I thought about the change the Internet has brought to us, and particularly how this change is shaping the world of our children.

I looked at him, shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s just a different way of delivering information.”

After getting more involved in scienceinthetriangle.org and thinking about his question some more, I’m no longer so sure about my answer.

I still believe the Internet as a technology is just a different means of delivering information. But it is in the way we chose to use this new delivery method where we change how we relate to each other, what we know and how we use our knowledge. Guttenberg’s printing press brought about literacy, which changed the way we think because reading molds the brain. Who’s to say, the Internet won’t do something similarly spectacular - especially since tectonic shifts are also rocking other parts of our world such as finance, geopolitics and the environment.

I also believe those shifts present opportunities that should be tapped with the help of new ideas and scienceinthetriangle.org is one of those ideas. I’m not sure where scienceinthetriangle.org will lead me and the others involved. But this is North Carolina’s Research Triangle, an area with a history of innovation. So I’m hopping on for the ride.

Along the way, I hope to come up with a better answer to my husband’s question.