Thursday, December 14, 2006
The Good, The Bad, The Virtual…Part 2
Last week I started my rant on the duality of this new Internet society we now all livein. I know there are many examples and I bet you can think of some I have missed.
Last week I used our seniors, well here’s another. Today, our kids can socialize through
chat rooms and web cams, globally. It has opened up a whole new world of diversity,
exchange and communication, this is a good thing. It has also given birth to a whole
new type of child predator, a very bad thing.
Everybody and everything has become totally reliant on computers and an Internet
connection. Everything, business, banking. telephone communications. A simple cash
register connects thru a modem when the clerk swipes your card. Our new digital
world has replaced the film camera, killed the record store. Email has been a
wounding blow to the post office (though the Internet was a boom to the shipping
companies).
High speed connections coupled with high end graphics have allowed for the creation
of whole new co-existing worlds. Some extremely real and some not so real but all
of them virtual. And, when it comes to virtual worlds and interactive games the ‘cloud’
is alive. Entire new worlds have been created and exist. In many instances people are
starting to use these to replace their real lives. This could be a bad thing .
It’s just that everything we do, everything we touch one way or another connects to
this thing we call “the cloud”, the Internet.
A scary result of this is how complacent people have become to computers being
around them and how much power they give to it. A simple dumb box that only
displays information that another person had put in. Ever notice how compliant people
have become when they hear “I’m sorry, but that is what the computer said”. It
doesn’t matter why. Credit card denied, club membership has expired, can’t get your
license renewed (my other story). When you get to the point of “I’m sorry, but that is
what the computer said”. The conversation is over. Neither you nor the other person
is going to get much further.
In our minds, this ‘Cloud’ has become an all knowing, all connecting abstract thing
where the universe is stored. Something so big so complicated that we can only
search it with Google. This ‘Cloud’, to us, is probably better off just being known
as the ‘Cloud’ and all our computers and devices connect us to this Cloud’ and some
all knowing data base hidden somewhere deep inside, so if the computer says so, it
must be true right? This is a really a bad thing.
This is where the Real world and Virtual world collide and mix and we start to hand
off control to the virtual and this is where our heads get lost in the cloud.
by Chris Kaminski,
Head Technician for Computer Guys Live Inc.
An online computer repair company based in Asheville, NC
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