I have the distinct sense we’re being flooded with a whole new step-up in information. What’s happening is not unlike when the Internet began to get traction and everyone could suddenly sense there was a lot more information swirling around out there than ever before.

The Internet has been technically available since the early 1970’s, and grew in near stealth within its own techno-savvy community until the mid-1990’s. What happened than was the expansive growth of personal computers, affordable color screens and the point-n-click interface. This made the concept of a World Wide Web technically feasible: Our computers could look like our television sets, and full-on literacy became less of a required skill and more of an option.

So we found ourselves in the late 1990’s with the Internet going mainstream and a plethora of predictions that everything would be moved to the web. We would be free – free, at last! – of paper. It was irrational enthusiasm at its finest.

Of course, the web was in its infancy. If your local garage put up a web page, it actually made the paper. The White House and Mickey Mouse both got web sites within weeks of each other. New information was coming out our ears. Or so we thought. We had yet to experience the boom and bust, much less the likes of google. But the Internet simply kept growing, independent of all the hype around it.

So, what’s happening now, a decade later? In simple terms, the Internet has gotten fat – and I mean this in the very best sense of the word “fat.” The escalating numbers of how many are connected to the Internet has flattened. Just about everyone who wants to be connected, is. The real news is that the connection between each Internet user and the Internet has been pumped up to let huge quantities of data flow.

It was one thing when the only available connection was a dial-up phone line, and modest websites and simple email changed the status quo. In the interim, computing went mobile, connections went wireless or to heavy-duty data lines, and music went iPod. Cell phones themselves transitioned to a full selection of choices – from simple disposable models to full-keyboard, word-processing-and-spread-sheet-capable, touch-screen omni-devices.

Everything but your toaster can connect you to the Internet, and it can do it fast.

Still, new hardware capability only enables the possibility of change. Real change happens when the technology gets into the hands of humans, and that’s what we’re seeing now. This latest step-up in global information load is all about video. Videos of teenagers air-guitaring out on MySpace. Indy bands and celebrity ambushes freely floating out on YouTube. Soldiers in Iraq making documentaries, along with everyday people in newsworthy circumstances. Video is everywhere, and everyone is in on it.

It was once news in and of itself when major television networks decided against broadcasting questionable footage. Today, when they report the existence of a terrorist video, a few keystrokes and clicks later, and you can see it for yourself – uncut. So just as television has leapt from a handful of channels to hundreds, video on the Internet has exploded.

Our great-grandchildren may not understand why society was so excited about the Rodney King tapes. In their lives, action will be recorded everywhere all the time.

So from here on in, history has a new job, and it’s an evolving one, at that. Historians must somehow document the state of technology at each moment in time, and they must also document what society expected of it to boot.

Ubiquitous video has now entered the human condition.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.