Three years old? How dated.

In reading chapters three and five of Elizabeth Hanson's "The Information Revolution and World Politics," I found myself wondering at how dated her outlook on the internet feels. It seems that even over the course of three short years since this book was published, the internet has surpassed all expectations. Since 2007, the year of Hanson's most up to date figures in her book, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled to two billion and now some 30% of the world's population has some kind of access to the internet.

This is not a critique of Hanson, but rather an observation of the near futility of analyzing the potential of the internet. The speed by which its efficacy and penetration grows is, for a lack of a better word, ridiculous.

The information gap is closing, access to the internet is increasingly affordable everyday and we're now getting closer to developing affordable computers for the developing world as well. By affordable, we're talking for the same price as lunch and a drink in the Mary Graydon Center. The world of the internet right now does not seem to dissimilar from the scene Hanson painted of India during their television boom: cable companies sprouting every which way, tying cable lines to trees, lamp posts and anything else standing still.

Hanson notes Bill Gates' point that having a laptop won't help somebody who's starving to death and they're right, internet access is not a silver bullet for world peace and prosperity. However, access to the internet opens avenues of completely unexplored potential to everybody.

Three years from now, where will the internet be? What about two? Will access to broadband internet be considered a natural human right? Free wifi for everybody? Tom Clancy predicted a world where people done virtual reality headgear and literally surf the internet in his futuristic spy series Net Force. Far-fetched? Time will tell.