Dwapara Yuga & Technology Adoption

In 1855, Britain's Daily Telegraph Newspaper was founded. The telegraph in the title was the then height of technology providing for the first time news from around the world at the same time. Prior to that, dispatches from the Americas, Africa or Asia would be weeks or months old.

The chart above (from the NY times) shows the increasing rate of adoption of technologies (in the US) that annihilate space, connecting peoples around the world both physically (via planes, trains and automobiles) and via ideas (telegraph, telephone, television, internet, IM) - the most visible aspects of Dwapara Yuga (the more subtle ones being sociological and spiritual).

As we can see it took 100 years for the plane old telephone service (POTS) to reach 100% adoption yet the cellphone did it in 10. New technologies such as instant messaging (IM) have even steeper adoption curves, leading to a much more social, almost network youth culture.

The poster children of such a culture would be Tim Berners Lee in 1990 with the World Wide Web and Linus Torvalds in 1992 with Linux, sharing freely their work, a sharp contrast with the selfishness of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison a generation before, exploiting DOS and SQL respectively, both invented by other.