It seems that what we have come to call 'technology' has sort of run into a brickwall.
The thrill we experienced in the late 1980s and into the 1990s is just not quite as thrilling as it was back the. Windows, Apple, Microsoft Office, cell phones, laptops, downloads, uploads, application after application, flat screens, wide screens, remote access, this and that, on and on.
Technology is one of my favourite hobbies. Yet, with every new release or new promise of the next BIG THING all I get out of it is a BIG YAWN. I want to know why?
Is it my age? Is it my gender? Or is it because Gates and Jobs have finally run out of ideas?
The early days of a company called Mosaic were so exciting, then Netscape, then Yahoo - now Google, eBay and so on. Sadly, they have now all become the GMCs, Fords, Shells, Exxons and GEs of of todays world. Boring, staid, lackluster, bottom-lining trawlers. Alliances and dalliances trundling on in a dreary nanoplastic dance where we have all become the audience, consumers reliant on cyber content.
Technology is going through a fine-tuning period it seems. We are ironing out the bugs, a tiresome techno-edit which results in nothing more daily offerings of the same old products with the lame promise of "bigger, faster and the famous 'much much more' which never goes on to say exactly what 'much much more' may mean if it were asked udner oath. The collapsing prices of chips, hard drives and the computers they inhabit is very telling. Not even dual core technology has received any great 'yahoo' from user. Add to this the fact that the giant Microspft ahs not managed to fart out its latest rendering of an operating platfrom and one wonderswhat the hell is going on? Steve Jobs must be happy to note that Gates has stumbled yet again on the OS side of things, but the millions of PC users wonders must be getting the jitters. The technology highway was always going to be bumpy, but now it seems that we may have run out of road all together.
The chances of another gates or Steve Jobs coming along in the near future must be very slim indeed. Here's the problem. What on earth's planet do we need that we do not already have in the context of technology and information. Sure, we don't all have it, but that is only a matter of time.
We need to cure cancer, aids, poverty, housing, education, freedom of speach and religious choice. Let's not talk about democracy; that's a sore point right now.
The world as whole needs to give its head a shake and focus on the needy and a dying planet. Technology can wait.
