The High Tech World

Whoa, there, don’t go away, give me just one paragraph!

Personal Computers, Windows, Mouses, Laptops and Notebooks, Hardware and Software, Active Matrix, Modems, Wireless, WAP phones, Interactive, Office Suites, Word and Excel and Powerpoint, Databases, Desktop Publishing, Contact Management, Online, the Internet and the Web, Java Apps, E-mail, Netiquette, MUDs and RPGs, Simulators, AOL, Netscape, Instant Messaging, Chat Rooms, ISP’s, Kilobytes and Megabytes (and MegaHertz) and Gigabytes and Terabytes, Hard Drives, ZIP Drives, RAM and ROM, GPS devices, PIMs and PDA’s, Palm Pilots, Digital Cameras, Digital Picture Frames, MP3, Napster, Rip and Burn, Intellectual Property, DVD’s, E-books, Bio-Technology and Genetically-Modified foods, the Human Genome, AI, Robotics, The New Economy, E-Commerce, E-Business, The Matrix, free wireless world-wide communication, enough, enough, enough, this is for my grandchildren, not for me! OK. If you’re honestly convinced you can’t learn what your 4 year old grandchild (or great grandchild) is learning, and using every day, then OK, maybe you’re right, your mind is not as agile as it once was. But why SHOULD I care? I don’t need this stuff. You’re right, you don’t NEED this stuff, you led a perfectly fine life before this stuff came along. But the real reason to be curious about this new world is that it is real today and it’ll be more real tomorrow, it’s fascinating, and it’ll grab and excite you at the same time that it terrifies and frustrates you. So, come along for the ride, I promise you you’ll enjoy it. Or I’ll give you your time back.

That’s the deal, you’ve done your part, if you want to abandon ship -- and we will be making port all over the High-Tech world -- you can disembark now, with no prejudice. And the nice thing is, you can catch up later, no penalty for being hesitant now.

But back to our discussion.

But you know, this new high-falutin high-tech world is not all good, millions of people have been laid off because of it, hundreds of thousands have lost real money investing in high-tech stocks and dot coms, and the future does not look any better because of it. As a matter of fact, the future looks pretty scary and bleak if you ask me.

You’re right. I totally agree. Already the foxes are loose in the hen-house with government’s looking the other way. This high-tech world will be tragic unless we take control. Indeed, the most influential writings about high-tech are warning pieces which we will ignore at our peril. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle and every new technology has demanded we learn how to use it before it does us too much damage. We got burned harnessing fire. And I have the blisters to prove it, still. The understanding of the inside of the atomic nucleus scared some (of those smart enough to know what was coming) and killed tens of thousands of others, but we have learned to deal with it and it’s been a long time since even the French tested an atomic bomb (yeah, I’ve heard of Chernobyl). And we will learn to deal with this new world, with its threats, or we will be the worse because of our ignorance and cowardice.

But the vocabulary; why does the high-tech world demand we learn its jargon, why does it make up so many words and ugly-sounding ones at that?

Well, some of the new vocabulary may be funny sounding and awkward. But every field of knowledge, new or old, academic or everyday, has its jargon. One may insist that jargon is a way that practitioners keep out others from its sacred halls. But jargon is any field’s short-hand, it is the way that people in the field communicate without having to use kindergarten vocabulary. And if you give us, you and me, a chance, you will see how easy, and necessary, it all is.

So what are the pieces to this high-tech world. Give me a BRIEF overview.

The central idea of this revolution is computers for individual people. Micro-computers, PC’s, call them whaty you will. The central technological innovation that fuels this revolution is the “computer chip,” the tiny plastic and silicon centipede that Intel (among others, but you’ve heard of them!) designs and manufactures. The star performer is the Microprocessor, the supporting actor is the Memory chip. They are called chips because if you threw a hundred of them into a snack bowl and stepped away, it would look like a bowl of over-cooked Fritos chips. These chips are the heart (well, the brains) of Personal Computers and all the other technologies I mentioned in my opening paragraph.

PC’s have allowed large corporations to lay off millions of people in the last two decades and they have made staggering fortunes for a few (some have been directly responsible for those layoffs). As tools of Business, they may become a frightening attack on our livelihoods, our privacy and our very liberty. In OUR hands, they provide us with tools that allow us to work from home, from our favorite coffee-shoppe, or from our travel-destination of the month. They allow us to compete head-on with Mega-Corporations and to show Tyranny how powerless it is to silence us. They link us together, in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

Our choices, yours and mine and our children’s, will re-shape our world after our vision, unless we refuse to see, then we get someone else’s vision. So come along, this is your world we will be examining and understanding.

created on 5/3/2001