http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/media/magazine/16-06/ff_15th_rossetto
Louis Rossetto, the founder and former publisher of Wired magazine tells how the magazine was formed out of San Francisco's early '90s digital underground.
Dear Orson and Zoe,
Fifteen years ago, when your mom and I started Wired, you weren't even born. And now look at you you guys were playing Go Fish with the original crew at the magazine's 15th anniversary party.
Back in 1993, we had only the slightest glimmer of what the Internet would eventually become. But we had a very clear idea what Wired was supposed to be about: the people, companies, and ideas driving the Digital Revolution. The results of that revolution Googling your homework, iChatting with your cousins in Paris, buying your Lego NXT off eBay seem like so much background noise to you now, but back then it was a big deal. In the very first issue, I wrote, "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."
Got a lot of grief for that typhoon reference as if it were a pretentious exaggeration instead of the understatement it turned out to be. Should have said the Digital Revolution was ripping through our lives like the meteor that extinguished the dinosaurs. Practically every institution that our society is based on, from the local to the supranational, is being rendered obsolete. This is the world you are inheriting.
We at Wired saw it coming, because our mission was to connect our readers to the reality of our times. It's the evolutionary function of media: Those individuals/tribes/societies that are most connected to the larger world, as it really is, are most likely to survive and thrive and move on to the next level in the big game of life. We were successful as an enterprise not because we used eye-popping fluorescent colors (although that didn't hurt) but because we did the hard work of accurately describing the world as it was changing. Of course, we didn't get everything right.
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