Modern Times.......

[XTR]

I'm not sure how many of you here..... get around to reading the topics posted on The Inquirer. Today we have a nice article by our own Editor, David Ross.

It's well worth a read. I've been discussing this article with a friend (yes... i do have some ). It's interesting to see peoples views about this modern day revolution.

Its changing the way we live... taking over the traditional methods but is this good? It's creating alot of debt at the same time... no wonder the bank of england are increasing interest rates to deter people from spending on credit cards, taking loans out etc...... people are wanting to keep up with the times and buy all the latest gizmos. Alot of them, cant afford them, but need to have them.


Here's the article link -- Enjoy

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14073

[Elmo]

I was thinking this the other day. My chemistry lecturer was getting a bit peeved with the poor turn out for lectures (mainly because he put all his notes on the internet the night before) and asked if he did his lectures over a webcam link if we'd prefer that. Now at first i thought "yeah cool! i can do my lectures from my bed! great!" but the i thought, well... would this be so great? or would it just encourage students who, lets face it, have a reputation to be rather lazy at the best of times! If all our lectures were done via a webcam link, we'd have no reason to go to uni, we could hand in assignments via email, and ask questions the same way. We wouldnt have any sort of *REAL* interaction with other humans on our course and we'd just become socially inept.

Its interesting to think about how technology has changed our lives and think about how it could change them futher in the future.

[Nimrod]

I totally have to agree with what David has put across in his artcle, the whole issue of our use of technology has been something that I and a few friends have been aware of for a few years now. And unfortunatley I too fear that our reliance on technology and mobile communications will eventually be the downfall of humanity.

For example, a good 3+ years ago I, along with twenty coursemates, were staying in a hotel for our Graduation weekend. We all went out on the lash the first night and got back late, as you would expect from a bunch of students
The next morning (lunchtime) having finally scrapped myself out of bed, I went down to the bar to gt some food. I will never forget what I saw...

Of my 20 mates, at least 10 of them were sat in the bar on their laptops all dialed up to the web via their mobile phones. Initially I thought it was a work thing but no, they were all checking their email / IRC pagers / forums etc ! I found this quite shocking but it got worse !
We had a drunken discussion on the topic that night and it turned out that more or less all 20 of them had some mechanisim for remotely checking their email. Worse still they had a "need" to check it, almost habbit like !

Back then I found this behaviour a little strange but just kind of accepted it as you're normal geek being just that, a geek ! What concerns me now is that I find myself behaving in exactley the same way and there really is nothing I can do about.
As David mentions in his article, people's expectations of a speedy response increase with the more widespread access to online communications and for me this means that being offline for even a single weekend can lead to two things:
1) A serious backlog of communications that I have to work my way through,
2) Loss in business as my reply was not fast enough :/

This means that I find myself in the position where I need to be constantly online. To solve this I find myself spending stupid amounts of money on the latest mobile device to ensure that I have the connection and truely what does it mean ?? It means that I have less time to myself and end up spending more time (and money) on work.

Am I happy ?? Probably, I find it very difficult to remember a time when I didn't have email and net access
The thing that concerns me is that I have a lot of friends whom don't have email / SMS / internet access and for that reason I find myself losing contact with them ! Will this mean that sooner or later I am going to have to settle for a cyber pint down my local Prince of Web pub where I'll be able to "meet" up with all my online net head mates ??

[Punky]

computers can be useful, but to a certain degree. take schools for example: when i started school (bout 14yrs ago), we did a lot of hands-on practical work, writing stuff out and lookin at what the teacher put on the board. nowadays, a lot is done via computer programs, which is easier on the teacher (i ain't sayin teaching nowadays is easy, my mom is a teacher and i see how much work she has to do), but it kinda depersonanlises the lesson and removes the hands-on experience i had when young.
and as for taking your lappy on a weekend away on the lash...WHY?! i don't particularly care if i'm without a computer for a few days, its a nice break.
peace.

[5lab]

i dont see why this is a bad thing. its just evolution. much as technology in the past has meant we met more people (ie, 80 years ago you would probably only meet ~100people in your lifetime, whereas 20 years ago we were travelling so much we met many more people. i read an article by psycologists which suggests that mobiles have given us a similar sense of community that we had many years ago - where we are able to simply interact with the few people we want to quickly and easily (as was a village lifestyle) - something that was missing in the last century or so..