Einstein's Theory of Relativity put an end to the idea of simultaneity. Basically, his theory said that two events could take place simultaneously only if they occurred in the same place, and since two events cannot occur in the same place, they cannot be simultaneous. This was, at the time, a more theoretical than practical discovery. Given the limits of our perception, we're still quite capable of experiencing two events as simultaneous. And advances in electronics and other technologies had, until very recently, done little to shake our acceptance of that illusion. The speed of telephone, radio, television, and other direct transmissions generally enhanced our sense of apparent simultaneity. But the Internet and other computer technologies are starting to make simultaneity's illusory nature clearer.

It used to be possible to put two televisions near each other, tune them both to the same channel, and see the same thing at the same time. My wife and I have one television in the bedroom with a standard digital cable receiver, and another in the living room with a DVR (TiVo-like) receiver. If we put them both on the same channel, the images on the television in the living room will be noticeably behind the images on the television in the bedroom because the signal is being recorded on the hard drive in the DVR before being transmitted on to the television. In fact, the other night, through some glitch that left us a bit unsettled, Sleeper was still showing on IFC in the living room more than half an hour after it had finished in the bedroom.

It used to be possible to put two radios near each other, tune them both to the same frequency, and hear the same thing at the same time. My wife and I have a wireless home network with two computers (three, if you count my laptop). If we both listen to the same audio stream on our computers, they'll be slightly out of synch with each other (despite the fact that they're both coming from the same server over the same wire into our apartment and being routed through the same AirPort base station) because of the asynchronous, non-broadcast nature of Internet Protocol.

As more and more of our media becomes computer-based (with advances like Video-on-Demand and VoIP), this trend will only become more apparent. I wonder if children raised in the technological context this creates will find Einstein's theories more intuitively understandable.