The Advance of Technology in Out of the Way Places

NB wrote this Jan 08, brought over from a blog I'm closing down...

I was going to say the 3rd world, but then realized that it isn't just them that are involved, but areas of the world that are developed, but have large pockets of under developed spaces... the Canadian North is a prime example as is areas of Northern Europe... where the people are sparse on the ground and technology as in telephones and computers are slow to catch up...

a few years back had discussions with my South African friend and my best friend here, who is from Finland, about how cellular phones were going into places where there had never been land line phones, because the infrastructure was so expensive... but with the drop in price of cell phones from 1000's of dollars to under 200 and lower, has led to a boom in the use of them, as the towers went up... and in our Arctic, where satellite TV came on line in the 80's and 90's bringing the south to the north, bringing with it longings for more of the south's comforts and excesses...

Cellular phones and satellite communication connected us all, whether we want to acknowledge it or not... and while expensive, even there the prices are within reach of the ordinary person... learnt last year that some boats that were shipped north, ended up mothballed for the winter, because the cold was too much for their plastics, which would crack in the water, whereas the traditional hide boats were still being made and doing a fine job ;0 without the expensive motors and oils to keep the motors going... relearning what had been learnt during the second world war, but by another generation...

anyway, back to the cell phones and computers... read that the 100 dollar laptop, that is being promoted as a way to get the 3rd world into the net, and children into education on computers, is having problems with gov'ts not wanting to rock the boat of their own control... information being power... well, in the same surfing, I found another article on cell phones in the 3rd world becoming the computer of choice... hmmmmm a cell phone, being a computer... well, when I began to think about it, and how Cell phones have changed over the last decade, I began to realize as the article's writer said, that people were already connected to the Internet, and using cell phones in ways not intended by the original concept, as applications multiply for them... now many of them are micro computers, with more power than the first computer that I had back in 1985... an Atari 400... and with application programs that I couldn't have begun to dream of back then... and yet, there is demand for more apps, that apply to those using these mini-computers, which a South African start up dot.com is working on...

as the writer said, who better to write these apps than someone who is in the network that is using them, rather than someone here in North America, where we are so tied to our desktops and laptop computers... and the market... well, think of all of Africa AND India/Pakistan for a start, and then let your mind wander, and you soon realize you are talking perhaps 2/3 or more of the worlds population...

but this is where I hasten to differ... the 'Market' could be more on the order of 75% or more as my generation, the baby boomers, fade out of the picture... we have "kids" (I categorize anyone under 35 in here) who while they go on line to play games and do social communication on a desktop computer, many are more dependent on their cell phones, blackberries and PDA's, for these day to day dealings... and these little '3rd world apps' could be the building blocks of what I would call potentially the 3rd iteration of the world wide web... where the real descendant of the Star Trek hand set, will become a reality... as in another app that I saw was an attempt to translate dog barks in a way that enabled a person to understand what the dog wanted or was feeling...

now it is a stretch perhaps, but in another generation, how about the translating of voice communications... not just words, but how the person is saying it... on a small little computer that is in ones pocket... we are a long way off from the embedded chip behind the ear, perhaps 75 years or more, hard wiring into our brain, but even that I don't think is as impossible as I would once have...

so while I have leaped from 3rd world advances jumping over developed world infrastructure, into the developed worlds uses of 3rd world advances and onwards and upwards, I believe what we will have in my lifetime (say another 20 years, conservatively, but that is another blog ;-) have outstrip the predication's made by Bill Gates and the head of Intel recently, saying that handheld computers and their capabilities would increase exponentially over the next decade, bringing the WWW closer to our every day lives...

more than just the idea of a computer inside or outside your fridge telling you what is not there, or wall screens which entertain, connect and inform us... they envisage a world of tools that will be as varied as birds in the sky... me, I see less variety in tools and more variety in apps that we will use at our leisure, when at home and while out and about... tying us together in a world of socialized and interrelated people, where a friend and neighbour is no longer only someone we communicate face to face, but someone we interact with through all available channels, almost instantaneously...

Thoreau stated that a neighbour is someone who affects my life, and who in turn is affected by me... that is his statement paraphrased in it's simplest terms... for him the people who came visiting at Waldon Pond, and the train driver who went by like clockwork, were his neighbours... but the people he read about in his newspaper were not neighbours (of course unless it was about people in his town) but shadows, who didn't affect his life or he theirs... now today, our neighbour can be anyone in our Internet social network, from e-mail to voice mail, to text messaging and Lord knows what else, and She is only guessing ;0 so given that we could be connected to the world via these little hand held computers, we will potentially have neighbours from next door, to central India or the Arctic circle... with the help of those little apps doing the translating for us... the question remains, what will that mean for how the world will see itself...

what affect will this have on perceptions and world view... will we open up or will we close down under the noise from so many neighbours... will it be harnessed by the world media to re-interpret for us, as it was in the latest gulf war... or will we be free to make relationships and begin to bring understanding and tolerance to the world, from the variety of ideas and lives being lived, and their view points... only time will tell: who would have thought that cell phones with text messaging would be such a world changer...

but it is happening... just as the computer, the web and e-mail changed how we interact at long distance... (and before that the telephone) and we are still, even now, only at the beginning... the waves will only get higher to use a surfing analogy... as technologies develop and converge to bring about more change (or is it chaos ;)... feel another post developing there :O I enjoy using the web to surf the news about the world... and there are things converging technologically, that would stand your hair on end... but they will happen, and not in a hundred years, but 30 and 40 years... this blog has only been about one strand of the rope that leads into the future...

when I look back from where I began 60 years ago, I have to shake my head, and say we would never have believed it, if someone had come from now and told us... all the social and technological, the religous and political changes that have occured... yet, these changes and more happened, and will be in the pages of history books in only a few years, if they already aren't... supplanted by other and more immediate changes... as the saying goes... "YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET!!" and with that I will end this little blog ;0 hope it has given you something to think about...