Dear reader,
2003 was the year in which
our family-computer got an internet connection. We had a world of
options!
We created e-mail
addresses and suddenly we were writing much cheaper and faster
e-mails to long distant family and friends. Do you remember when you
wrote your last letter to someone all in handwriting? A letter, not a
postcard! My last handwritten letter to someone was last year. More
of a sort of accident, because I needed to send something for a new
ID card and had no printer. My last letter before that? No idea. How
about you?
How did you order presents
for last christmas? I bought exactly one present in a shop.
Everything else I ordered comfortably online over the internet.
Somewhat sad really.
Anyway, what did we do
without the internet in the earlier days? Read more, I suppose. In
november 2012 the german newspaper “Frankfurter Rundschau” filed
an application for bankruptcy at the court in Frankfurt on the Main.
The printing costs were too high compared with the number of sales.
Why buy a paper anyway, if you can read everything online for free?
In february 2013 it was announced that the paper will keep on going
still.
Maybe everything was
better in the old days. At least many of us didn't spend that much
time in front of a screen and went out with others more often. Are
computers a bad thing as such though? The world is changing, that's
just the way it is and cultures and people are changing. In the old
days there were only books in libraries. Now you can get CDs and DVDs
there as well. In the old days there were catalogues of libraries in
boxes and information on index cards on paper. Now everything is in
computers and you can search easily and fast. And you don't even have
to go to the library to find they don't have the book you're looking
for or you can't currently borrow it. We can check that online at
home. Contrary to the online shopping, which makes me somewhat sad,
although I do that, too, I quite like the online search in library
catalogues. Or maybe not. Because without it, at least I'd be outside
once... The computer doesn't, at least not for now, replace humans
totally. The work does change a bit with computers though. I also
don't yet see the danger of technological changes and inventions
endangering our work place as such. Machines taking over the world? I
don't think so. Because for that the machines (for now) have too
little of a life of their own and in the end it's up to us, the users
of the technology to decide if or how much and how to use it. Even
though some tv programs by now are thought to be rather low and
stupid by many people, I still trust the humans to not be controlled
by machines that much in a sense that in the end the machines control
the humans.
Or maybe they do? Because,
what's left in a time of a black out that disables our devices? Even
if in our desperation, we'd turn to our books, we'd need light for
that to read them. Although that should cause no problem with the
modern eBook-readers, even in a time of a black out. Or if you've got
enough lights in the house and a match or fire-lighter.
In 2012 an australian film
came out called Underground: The Julian Assange Story
telling the story of the youth of Julian Assange, the founder and
chief editor of WikiLeaks. There's a scene where the young Julian
sits in his room with his girlfriend. It's already dark outside. She
tells him of a place where she'd like to go and asks him, if he likes
to travel. He tells her that he already has. When he's hacking
computers, he travels all the time. Sitting here in his bedroom and
at the same time being at the other side of the world. Then he asks
her to look outside the window and pick a suburb. She does. Julian
types in a few lines on the computer and suddenly all the lights to
out in the suburb she told him. “Did you just do that?”, she asks
him. He doesn't reply, just tells her to pick another suburb. “No”,
she says. “All those poor people are in the dark.” “They are
happy”, he says. “Did you know that nine months after a black
out, there's always a rise in the number of child births?”
telling the story of the youth of Julian Assange, the founder and
chief editor of WikiLeaks. There's a scene where the young Julian
sits in his room with his girlfriend. It's already dark outside. She
tells him of a place where she'd like to go and asks him, if he likes
to travel. He tells her that he already has. When he's hacking
computers, he travels all the time. Sitting here in his bedroom and
at the same time being at the other side of the world. Then he asks
her to look outside the window and pick a suburb. She does. Julian
types in a few lines on the computer and suddenly all the lights to
out in the suburb she told him. “Did you just do that?”, she asks
him. He doesn't reply, just tells her to pick another suburb. “No”,
she says. “All those poor people are in the dark.” “They are
happy”, he says. “Did you know that nine months after a black
out, there's always a rise in the number of child births?”
Finally the vision of the
“Factory of the Future” as Warren G. Bennis saw it:
The factory of the future
will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there
to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching
the equipment.
Until next
blog,
sarah
sarah
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