Mirror worlds

I joined the internet in 1999 back then when you put in a topic in to a search engine you would find yourself with perhaps a handful of fan made websites, not the half a million you can get now for something like 'Sonic The Hedgehog'. The internet then was made up of small communities, forums and chat rooms where you meet the same people each day (and could actually read all the posts). Comparing this with the real world you could call these villages and towns where you know everyone, where the online stores are small and hand made. I miss those days, where I would spend time in my small community of 100 members, I had my small group of friends or perhaps even an internet family, which I knew I could rely on for support in this strange new world (the internet) I learned a lot from each of them and I still value their friendship.
In a very short time the internet has grown, it now copies our own world, where websites have become vast cities of people, the small stores are gone now to be replaced by massive online supermarkets. People are now just random faces in a crowd, sites like facebook and bebo have created mass-produced poor quality houses (home websites) for us all, where as once people would build their own (mine still stands to this day) and take pride in the learning of how to build it.
If you have been around the internet for a while you will be able to make other parallels between the two worlds that now exist.
The internet has become a mirror image of the real world, however the internet moves much faster than the real world, in 9 years I have seen it grow from the small villages and towns to huge cities of people.
So I can not help but wonder, that perhaps the internet may over take the real world, if the internet mirrors the real world at a faster pace then surely that means that we will see the future of the real world in the internet first?