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Word: offing (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
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Usage:

What are we to make of all this in practical terms, philosophical terms, even spiritual terms? How to comprehend an age in which, suddenly, we find ourselves enmeshed in a huge information-processing system, one that seems almost to have a life of its own and to be leading us...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

The first step is to delete the word suddenly from that last sentence. For this giant social brain has been taking shape, and hastening change, for a long, long time. Not just since Emerson's day, when the telegraph--sometimes called the "Victorian Internet"--made long-distance contact instantaneous, but...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

This fact is best seen from a perspective that flourished more than a century ago, as Emerson was fading from the intellectual scene. In the wake of Darwin's theory of natural selection, some anthropologists started viewing all human culture--music, technology, religion, whatever--as something that evolves rather as...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

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Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

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