We live in a digital age with distinction that has transformed our lives upside down like never before in human history.

The best comparison we make to show how much change is to try to remember our lives in the 1990s. At the time, the Internet was in its infancy and not widespread in all homes. If you ask a teenager today about the Netscape browser of the 1990s, he probably won't understand what it means.

If you use the term tweet today, we all know that Twitter is meant to be something else. The only category that will not understand this meaning is that does not enter the Internet. But a tweet in the 1990s and earlier means the sound of birds, not something else.

Today's term means only the Internet, but in the early 1990s and before it had two meanings: the hunter's web or the spider's web. I remember that the term "network" spread throughout the country and the world in the mid-1990s, and the obsession with the term was such that even Hollywood released the 1995 film The Net, starring Sandra Bullock.

The term Stream, which means in the dictionary, is widespread today because Netflix, Apple and Amazon mean online entertainment. For this term, if we go back only 10 years to the past, some may understand that water flowing in a river or stream, and this means the prevailing throughout the history of mankind except this era.

The term cloud / cloud means remote storage in this decade, and mentioning it before 2010 was the cloud in the sky. The terms Field or Fiber also emerged from their original context and became very large only in a technical context.

The word Amazon itself no longer means the Amazon forest in Brazil as it was before 1996, but rather the famous Amazon online store. If you talk about the Amazon forests to the current generation, they may not understand what they mean or may not imagine that the Amazon is originally a jungle in South America.

In the next 10 or 15 years, the millennials and baby boomers will not know that Ali Baba is an Arab heritage.

From the early 1990s to today (29 years), the meanings of terms from the previous generation to the new have changed. This also means that intellectual, behavioral and cultural patterns have completely changed from the previous two generations.

In terms of behavior, people use the terms: tweet / network / flow / cloud / in a technical context rather than its original contexts of nature, this indicates that the daily attention has increased in the interest of technology at the expense of nature. In other words, technology has become more important to people than nature.

A linguistic study at the University of Leeds found that people use the words: mountain / picnic / pond / garden / bird / jungles / oysters / earth / rock. Less circulation among people since the 21st century.

Today's term means only the Internet, but in the early 1990s and before it had two meanings.

Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com

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