I am a Camera



According to this article, today I am supposed to tell you how the web has changed by life. The thing is that despite the complete change in outlook that is represented by the internet, I have been using it so long that none of the milestones really stick in my mind. I suppose I can remember the first time I saw some text-based pages all those years ago and how I registered with Amazon for the first time. I can even remember a bit of personal surfing one Christmas Eve when the whole office was standing around doing nothing productive. Only a couple of us had internet access at that time and I suppose the one thing that sticks in my mind is how something which so obviously was going to change lives, was ignored by the great and the good in our department. Maybe it just wasn’t dynamic enough back then – just text-based pages and all mostly in California. There were no fancy logos or colours just one defined background colour with all the pictured to be downloaded separately. I think I downloaded pictures of bridges that day. Now you can read www addresses of the back of rusty old vans in scrap yards – it has been around that long.

It still amazes me that despite the internet being part of almost everything these days, there are so many people in charge of what we do in this industry who still have no real idea what is possible. I always used to quote the (most-likely apocryphal) story of the businessman who sent his ZX Spectrum back because it wouldn’t tell him when his birthday was. This is of course the opposite of my argument. Maybe we should all be like that businessman and expect everything of our technology. The day will come (probably already has) when a computer could be asked this question and will use the retina or finger print that you have used to login to trawl all the databases it can find using its own initiative and will indeed be able to politely tell you when you were born. I love the internet and sometimes I still do get amazed by what it can do. Unfortunately, the children are not amazed and increasingly adults aren’t amazed either. Being amazed by something is the first step to asking what else you can do and without that sense of wonder we stifle development. I suspect that if just one more person in every ten started asking big questions of technology we could be reaching the stars in the next couple of decades. But then again, if the Romans had started doing this, we would be in another galaxy by now. Instead we have to spend so much time thinking about the next meal or how to avoid being the victim of the latest intellectually challenged idea from people who should know better. I always remember the scientists’ reply regarding the original Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative. With the technology available then, the whole project could not possibly work. Only one missile needs to get through for the whole thing to be a failure. I am back to my analogy from the programming world. Sometimes when you find yourself putting in all sorts of junky Boolean variables to be able to jump out of processing, you realise that the whole thing just cannot possibly handle the complexity you want without being stripped down and redesigned. Lots of things in society, lots of processes and procedures put in place by Government and business are either incompetent complexity which could be redesigned or deliberate obfuscation in order to confuse customers.

Things could be so much better but people just don’t know. We have the technology. We actually have the technology to make so much stuff that has not even been thought about. I am sorry, this was supposed to be a piece about how wonderful the net has made the world when actually it just makes me think how stupid we all are.