I’m a month shy of turning 35-years-old and I continue to grow more and more reliant on Facebook status updates to apprise me of the important (and unimportant) goings on of my friends and acquaintances. That’s kind of a scary reality for someone who never had a computer in college.

Yet there’s still part of me that thinks — and this is true when I find out that “John is tired” or “Jane is getting ready for a big day!” — I’m too old for this. Social networking is a concept I get — really, I do — but actually adopting it into my everyday life? I’m not sure that it can reach me on a really meaningful level. It’s simply too new of an idea.

Or at least that’s what I thought. It turns out that the concept of social networking — and the Internet as a whole — may be older than I am. It’s probably older than you, too. And maybe even your parents.

Paul Otlet (ot-LAY) was a Belgian academic who, in 1934, postulated that “electric telescopes” would transform the way people accessed information. A recent article in The New York Times goes on to say that these telescopes would:

“…allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. he called the whole thing a “reseau,” which might be translated as ‘network’ — or arguably, ‘web.’”

Here’s a short video [TRT - 1:20] detailing Otlet’s vision:

Unfortunately for Otlet, a combination of impossible scalability, government apathy, and Nazi occupation derailed his visionary project almost 70 years ago. But the remnants of his ruminations were always out there.

And so it makes me think about other ideas, both past and present, that have been discarded for one reason or another. Is the groundbreaking achievement of the year 2078 sitting in your Recycle Bin?