Nows and Forevers

A fun thing I wrote back in August 1999, when I was writing a weekly business column for my newspapers. It was a story about how small businesses keep up with changes.
About halfway through the story, I wrote:

At the end of the 20th century, Thompson pointed out, business moves faster than ever before. In years past, businesses had a fair amount of lead time to evaluate trends and options. But thanks to the faster pace of television and the Internet, “everything seems to happen faster,” Thompson said.

Talk about something that didn’t age well, through no fault of the interviewer or interviewee. Sure, TV and the early Internet brought a fast pace to the world. It even started to shake the foundations of the incredibly rural and self-sufficient place I lived and worked at the time, along the U.S.-Canadian border.
But that was about a decade before almost everyone started getting cell phones and then smartphones, when texting and then social media changed everything.
Twenty-four years later, I’m still trying to parse it all.