Skip to main content

Time to stop being a slave to technology!

Who isn't feeling a degree of disquiet about being so much harnessed to technology?  Computers, tablets and smartphones to name a few examples.    And then there are all the seemingly all-pervading social networks a la Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc.

"Every morning Mark Pesce resists the urge to dive into the digital world without turning his mind to meditation.

As a technology futurist and author, he has every reason to do otherwise. Yet he admits you can't expect to survive without regular time out in a world where the pace of innovation keeps increasing.

This week two names that have come to dominate people's lives rolled out new products - Apple launched the iPad mini, only six weeks after it released the latest iPad and iPhone, and Microsoft launched its latest, and possibly last, operating system, Windows 8.
It seems gadget-obsessed consumers just can't get enough.

Advertisement 
Australia ranks fourth in the world behind South Korea, Japan and Sweden for active mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants with a score of 82.7 per cent, the International Telecommunications Union reports.

Globally, consumers are also wrapped up in pursuit of the latest: it took Apple four years to sell 100 million iPhones, then just 2.5 years to sell 100 million iPads. Apple analyst Horace Dediu predicts the gap will close again with 100 million iPad minis sold by the end of 2013 - a little more than 12 months.

However, people are starting to ask what impact this rapid pace of technology adoption and innovation is having on Australian society, families, education and workplace productivity. Are we technology's masters or its servants?

"The whole culture is like a giant two-year-old. We're over-excited and we're going to need some nap time," Pesce says. "We're starting to get this sense that we have to find balance again."

If we have swung too far into the digital world, it's because we've been seduced by what Pesce describes as the joy of connecting to anyone, anywhere using social media and mobile devices."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more