a:Fiberoptics Rising

What about fiberoptics?


By Alex Strzetelski

Well, our good friends at CNN have…again, come out with an almost recent top 25 list. Although there is plenty of room for kibitzing, the list places the Internet at the top of the most important, non medical, inventions of the past 25 years.
As an agent of change it is fairly difficult to dispute that this organizational structure of letters, numbers and symbols has put a zip (no not a file type) into society and the way it tries to work. Should it be at the top?, maybe yes and maybe no.

The internet up to speed?

If a closer look is taken at the top 10, the case might be made for fiber-optics (#4), without which the internet would have a hard time functioning when considering the reaction times we now require. In fact, if several of the top ten items listed were to be considered only a few would be able to measure up without fiber-optics.
The consideration, however, is that several of the top ten “gizmos” actually run through the internet and would, likely, not be what they have become without it. This is how the internet made its way into the top spot. But would it be able to function to our satisfaction without fiber-optics?


To justify the placement of the internet atop the 25 most important inventions list it would need a social twist in its colon. How about replacing the invention of the internet with personal technology? Yes, the argument could be made that there has always been personal technology. But it would seem that at no time since electricity have so many new technology items been wrapped up in one spot over the last 25 years. To single out the internet as a single item when each of the other top ten items work in tandem with it to create a social phenom sort of diminishes the accomplishments that each of the others offer. But in most respects, this social phenom would not exist without fiber optics and all those bundles of light shooting around the world with our silly little cell phone pictures, e-mails and location services in them.

Social evolution

Perhaps it is the list itself that is blurring the line between these technological inventions. Perhaps their collective success has placed them into a category of social evolution rather than technological invention. Largely as a result of all of these inventions we have: a 20 something generation of I expect it now’s, social predators and isolation. But then again we have micro lending to desperately poor people around the world from people they will never know, surgeries in rural locations conducted with assistance from far away and loved ones seeing and speaking with one another over great distances. These are all social plusses and minuses. So, if the top 10 were to be folded into personal technology we would have that category followed by fiber optics. Or, possibly the other way around.



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