NEWSLETTER April 2005 Dear Member: THE OTHER DAY I was familiarizing a young lady with the Captain D Internet Club, and, oh happy day, she seemed more than willing to listen. She recently had opened a little restaurant of her own, and was just getting her feet wet. Turns out she had been getting start-up assistance from the Maine Small Business Development Center, and her adviser there had told her that tourists these days are all using the Internet to plan their vacations. I was telling her how Captain D can put her business online in a dozen different ways, and she was all ears. After I left, I didn’t think too much about her remarks. Growth in Internet usage is something I have learned to take for granted. In the ten years I have been going online, usage has always increased. Year-to-year e-commerce statistics usually show upward trends exceeding 30 percent. Later on, however, reflecting on my own figures, I began thinking that a shift of historic proportions may be taking place. We seem to be witnessing a quantum leap in Internet usage by people planning vacations. March for Captain D was the best month ever! Off season or not, traffic easily surpassed that of July and August 2004! For the first time ever, CaptainD.com attracted more than 300 visitors a day. All told, we did 10,000 visitors. The CyberSphere as a whole is on track to do more than two million hits—a quarter of a million visitors—in a year. In the past year alone, traffic has increased almost 60 percent. Traffic on seven of eleven sites has more than doubled. We seem to be experiencing a Hundredth Monkey phenomenon. And what, I am sure you’re wondering, is a Hundredth Monkey phenomenon? Well, it seems that for at least 50 years, scientists have been observing the Japanese monkey, Macaca Fuscata. It appears that Macaca Fuscata has experienced actual cultural growth. Half a century ago, only a few of them went to a nearby stream to wash sand from their sweet potatoes. Over time, however, some of them showed others how to do this, and gradually the custom caught on. And then an amazing thing happened. One day a new recruit was taught to wash his potatoes. (He may have been the hundredth one; the actual number isn’t known.) And once he started doing it, virtually all the other monkeys of the tribe followed suit. The growth, no longer gradual, was abrupt. The added energy on a single monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough. Potato washing became the norm! And then an even more amazing thing happened. Spontaneously, the habit of washing sweet potatoes jumped over the sea. Colonies of monkeys on neighboring islands inexplicably began washing their potatoes. Evidently, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind. Applied to people, it means there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by pretty much everybody everywhere. Spooky or not, this very well may be happening with the Internet! Captain D