New digital world is a double edged sword

This subject comes up often in the shop in the digital world we find ourselves in nowadays. All us old timers (well, not me of course) were told by our elders something like: "Don't get any of that fancy smancy stuff. It's just more things to go wrong". For instance when we were young, cars and trucks were pretty basic things. As far as turn signals, you just stuck your arm out the window straight if you were turning left, up for right and down for stopping. The windows were rolled up and down with a handle you turned. Originally, I was told even windshield wipers were a little handle you moved back and forth.

I swallowed all that for as long as I could but alas, one day............KABOOM! I now LOVE all the bells and whistles on newer cars. I love pushing the little doohickey the keys are attached to as I'm approaching my car and hearing the doors unlock. I LOVE the little cool buttons that make the windows go up and down. I LOVE the ones that will adjust the rear view mirrors side to side and up and down. I LOVE just telling the car what temperature I want in there and have it do whatever is necessary with the heater or air conditioner to make that happen. How cool is that stuff?

The recent news of all the problems Toyota is having points to the shortcomings of the digital revolution for sure. As cool as all that stuff is, there are clear potential problems and hazards if we completely trust all this digital technology.

The biggest digital change in everyones lives in the last years have of course been the whole computer world. Holy shit. Has that changed life or what? Typewriters became absolute overnight. Now we use Keyboards. With all the software Mr. Gates so gleefully provided us, writing letters, documents, graphs and books have become something almost anyone can do with a little education.

Then came the INTERNET......Holy shit times 10 over on this one......
Slowly but surely as it became more powerful and faster, basically the entire world became our playground and workroom. It brought with it instant communication around the world, instant file sharing and storage capabilities we can't even imagine yet. Entire libraries can be accessed instantly. What the Internet opened for humankind would take up not only this blog but enough books to fill a stadium so lets just agree it's a hell of a thing.

Now here's where this starts becoming a double edged sword though. As cool as the Internet is, it does come with some problems. I am a reader. A reader of books, newspapers and sometimes anything I can get my hands on. As we all know, the Internet has slowly eaten away newspapers place in society and that just might only get worse as time goes on. I've also heard of a "reader" system that's already here that will store hundreds, if not thousands of books. You can just call up whatever book you want to read and viola!, there it is to peruse.

Now I don't know about you but there's something calming, comforting and relaxing about having a real book or newspaper in my hands. In fact it's a huge, important part of my life. I'm really not sure if I ever want to make the jump to digital readers with these things.

The other issues I've recently heard about is what this "instant access" issue has been and is doing to our world financial systems. One of the main problems with our economy right now was caused by the attitudes of big business. The clear philosophy that exist today is greed. Immediate profits are all that matters. The long term viability of the companies slowly turned into a non-issue for the huge companies of America and even the world. Whatever it takes to make a buck RIGHT NOW became the normal business model.

Now the speed and dexterity of the Internet makes all that completely plausible. Those greedy bastards can do their backroom betting in the middle of the night when no one is watching the hen house. They could care less if it involves taking down a company or how many honest, hardworking folks they steal from. Being generally against government control or interferance in the business world, I have no idea how to regulate this kind of reckless behavior but it sure seems like a good path to examine.

So like most new things in life, this whole digital world comes with a bunch of positive things and a shit load of negative stuff too. Who knows where all this will play out in the future but I'm fairly sure it's here to stay....




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