<i>Carpe Occasio</i>! Celebrate National Internet2 Day
Today, lots of people on Internet2 member campuses will be celebrating National
Internet2 Day, locally with brown bag lunches, luncheons, and presentations
from campus-based speakers—and virtually, using a variety of netcast options.
We should all join them, no matter where we are.
Just as we now rarely give a thought to the people who designed and built the
Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Mackinac Bridge, and the Hoover Dam, users of the
ubiquitous Internet will, in what will seem like no time at all, reap their
connected benefits without considering pioneering efforts like Internet2. The
people we live and work with who have the vision and who are doing the work
will be forgotten, even as their creation lives on. So, carpe occasio,
Internet 2, seize this favorable moment!
Somewhere in the plastic boxes that house my collection of family photographs
there is an old oversize photograph with the upper right-hand corner torn off
that shows the ballroom of a fancy hotel. The image is more dark brown and beige
than it is black and white, clearly it’s an old print. Each of the many
tables is filled with people, mostly couples, dressed to the nines, smiling
broadly, and lifting glasses in a toast. On the back, in very legible handwriting,
the photograph is labeled, “Pete and Mae, 1938.”
I never met Mae, but did get to enjoy Pete in his later years. “Pete”
was Pete Clarity, my wife’s grandfather. He had grown up in Panama, where
his father was an engineer with the Panama Canal project. Pete graduated from
Renseallear and he helped build the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
I think about Pete and the thousands of people, some of whom gave their lives,
every time I drive across Pennsylvania, but most drivers and passengers never
give it a thought. There are places along the way where you could take a moment
and stop and view a bronze plaque with some commemorative language, but few
do. The situation is the same with other important and useful projects that
I have recently driven across, like the Mackinac (Mack-in-awe) Bridge that connects
the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan and the Hoover Dam. Even though the
government has turned Hoover Dam into a tourist trap, you only see that if you
drive over it – not if you are benefiting downstream from its existence.
But the people who designed and built those things, illustrated by that old
photograph, did in fact celebrate. They did more than carpe diem, seize
the day, they seized the “favorable moment,” occasio. They knew
they were doing a big thing, and recognized and celebrated its importance in
changing their world.
The Internet2 folks – those who fund it, those who run it, those who
are doing the hands-on work, and everyone else on various campuses who are collaborating
and supporting them, are changing the world. And, if you think about the scope
of building Internet 2, the stress and the travel involved for many, there probably
will be lives given up in a this project, too, sadly.
All too soon there will be few memories of the Internet2 project. We’ll
zip around in public transit and in our cars with ubiquitous connectivity to
anything we want, any time we want it. We will live in unimaginable combinations
of virtual and physical communities. And we will give almost no thought to how
it all came about. It is even unlikely that there will be much in the way of
monuments in concrete and bronze, since the whole thing is virtual and distributed
anyway. Where would you put the monument? Whose names would you inscribe?
We are all at the same place, all at the favorable moment, occasio, when this
is happening, and we can recognize it. That’s the genius of Internet2
Day. I recommend that you visit the related Web site - http://events.Internet2.edu/2004/Internet2Day/
- and register as a participant. Carpe occasio – seize this favorable
moment and be part of it.
