For my birthday, Paula bought me the Winged Migration DVD. We'd seen it in the theaters last summer and loved it. Tonight we watched it again. It's one of the most breathtaking movies I've seen.

Over four hundred people spent four years filming birds in flight to make a ninety minute movie with no plot, few humans, and next to no narration. To some, I'm sure this is a very boring movie. "Look, birds flying... whoopee." As for myself, when I came out of that theater, my understanding of birds had fundamentally changed. I'd seen them on the ground, at the feeder, in the sky, but never had I actually flown with them through canyons, over mountains, and across oceans. My esteem for their everyday reality grew immeasurably, simply because these filmmakers managed to show me something old in a very new way.

I can think of other moments when our collective consciousness changed because of our ability to see things in a new way. Seeing the first photos of the Whole Earth, taking from space, was an emergent experience that forever changed our collective sense of place. I'm sure it was the same when Galileo looked through his telescope, then showed it to others. Using the program Starry Night forever changed my understanding of astronomy. It's one thing to see tinker-toy models of the solar system, and quite another to watch the stars trail across a virtual sky modelled after what you're seeing, right now, out your window.

These new eyes we're given, these cognitive flights of fancy we're able to take with our new technical toys ... they change how we perceive ourselves in our environment. As we head into a century that's sure to bring incredibly advances in how we interconnect, understand, and visualize our world, it's clear ... we ain't seen nothing yet.