The Tyranny of Technology

If you are over 50 and reading this, congratulations! You have stuck your big toe into the digital age. Approximately 74% of those between the ages of 50 and 64 actively use the internet. But if you are over the age of 64, it’s a different story. The number drops dramatically to 35%. That is a stunning figure, showing that a large and important segment of our society operates in a different world than the rest of us, to their strong disadvantage.

But it’s more than whether one has access to a computer or the internet. I consider myself more tech savvy than most people my age. But that isn’t saying a whole lot. I inherited my mother’s old Bose radio, and I saw that Bose had CD changer that could be hooked up to it. I brought it to the Bose store and was told the radio was too old to handle the Bose hookup, but that it did have the connections to handle any other CD changer. So I went to Radio Shack to see what was on the market.

I was so depressed when I left the store, I had to reach for my Celebrex. I was totally clueless as to what ¾’s of the stuff on the shelves did. It was mind boggling. Couple that with a tech update that I saw on Fox News describing how all video, audio, gaming, storage, yada yada yada would soon be hooked up through your Xbox connected to your television, now with 3D glasses, I was ready to look for my old RCA phonograph and forget the whole thing.

Over the next two weeks, Google and Apple will be announcing major technological breakthroughs in wireless communications, computer pads, and content delivery methods. If you have a Kindle, watch out. (Who, among you, knows what a Kindle is?) While it’s easy to throw up your hands in disgust and react with the usual "who needs that junk?”…the fact of the matter is that the answer is “you do.” This is how news, books, weather, television, music, will be delivered in the future. In ten years, paper newspapers will be, for all intents and purposes, gone. You will need a delivery system to get them. That doesn’t even begin to cover books, music, movies, and television programming we take for granted now. Have any of you visited Hulu?

What is disturbing to me, and I believe dangerous to the ultimate security of our country, is that all of this stuff is happening out of control. The technologies are changing too fast for a large segment of the population to keep up, and most of the technologies are incompatible with each other.

For those my age, you will remember the technological duel between Betamax and VHS video recorders. VHS won out. The choice, however, was only between 2 competing technologies. Today, there might be 5 companies with 10 different technologies competing with each other…with no clear winner. They all end up existing next to each other, and they are incompatible with each other. An example would be I-Tunes (Apple) and MP3 (Napster and Amazon) players. Equipment is made for both formats of downloading and playing music, and it is only minimally compatible.

It gets more complicated, and dangerous, when you get into wireless communications. Cell phone companies have grown beyond wireless telephone calls, turning their products into suppliers of just about everything through the PDA devices. (Who, among you, knows what a PDA is?) While there is some compatibility, for the most part the equipment manufacturing companies are required to make the hardware and software "company" specific…so AT&T equipment is not compatible with Verizon or T Mobile. It is confusing and ultimately dangerous as the unified system of national communication built by Ma Bell in the 20th century becomes more and more fragmented in the 21st century leaving us vulnerable to all sorts of hacking and computer terrorist threats…let alone our own personal ability to just keep up.

I am obviously not a big government person. But I think as the speed of technological change increases geometrically and the platforms for communication become more fractured, the government really ought to be setting standards to allow interchangeability and compatibility for the vast majority of our electronic devices and methods of communications.

To do otherwise leaves this country vulnerable to all sorts of problems from within and without. Just imagine if the computer systems in this country were to be disrupted for any extended period of time. We would be back in the stone age within 2 weeks…and that is a scary thought