You’ll have to excuse me if I muddle technology, information technology and social media as I blog. There are so many strands to this blog that I foresee several follow-up articles to develop some of the issues covered!
I do, in my defence, come from a generation to whom the sliding doors on Star Trek were a thing of amazement. Little did we know that strings were involved! To me the terms are all pretty much interlinked anyway and strings usually are involved in most things!
Talking of Star Trek it’s quite amazing how it predicted some of the technological future that is now our present, as this article from a couple of years back demonstrates: Top 10 Star Trek inventions
But as ever I digress. Somewhat belatedly you may argue I have joined the iPhone revolution. Months of nagging by my daughter and here I am at last. And I do have to say that in a matter of a fortnight I am pretty impressed. I have been described as a late but then very enthusiastic adopter of new technology and that’s about right in my view.
As apparently everyone does to begin with, and who am I to be the exception to the rule, I have checked in left right and centre, become the “Mayor” of my workplace and home, downloaded (and then often deleted) apps of all sorts (though not the vast number some seem to have judging by the plethora of recommendations I got) and generally marvelled at the speed everything happens.
I now know how my daughter manages to send so many texts in a month and how easy it is to do so! I have taken a picture and uploaded it to Facebook for all to see in record time, and even discovered quite independently of any advice how to add wee smiley faces to every message in sight! Which fact caused some more technologically savvy friends to exhibit signs of jealousy. But then I can find anything on Google!
I was most impressed when the Shazzam app managed to identify the Disco Polo song I was listening to - and then of course linked it to my Facebook page in seconds!
I marvel at the connectivity of it all to be honest.
But where is it all taking us?
There are as ever the harbingers of doom, forecasting the advent of the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984. But let’s be honest that day arrived long ago, albeit without the worst totalitarian overtones. You can’t turn a street corner these days without being in line of a CCTV camera, and we all leave electronic trails as we shop. And I could tell you exactly where one of my friends in particular is over the course of a day as his progress is posted stage by stage on Twitter.
There are those who take the opposite view and trumpet the victory of the individual over the state, citing events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the part social networking sites played in these events, to back up their views.
As ever the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; folk more intellectual than me have written of the battle between the demands of the state and multi-national business to impose some control over our access to information, and those advocating the power of the individual to surf the net and access information to their heart’s content.
And this, in my view, merely reflects the realities of the world we live in.
And perhaps no better place to illustrate this than the People’s Republic of China which I and my daughter will be touring in two weeks time. Even before I have left these shores I am aware of the huge extremes this world power encompasses. Andrew Marr toured an 8 million pound Shanghai penthouse in his recent Megacities series, which to some might illustrate the final victory of capitalism, but on the other hand for the whole of our visit we’ll be cut off from the world of Facebook altogether, and I have been warned to be prepared for the enormous chasm between the super-rich and the poor in this cavernous country.
And all this technology doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge either.
Just this morning I have seen a poll conducted in the USA last year, linked on Twitter of course, in which 20% of those polled did not know from which country they gained their independence, and 6% named one other than the UK.
And equally having technology available doesn’t mean it is, or indeed can be, taken up. Two or three examples spring to mind. The first is a survey, and for once my Google skills have let me down, but I did read it online, which showed the low penetration of internet access to large chunks of Glasgow, with a number of areas in the 10 lowest in the UK.
The second is the touch-screen arrivals machine we have in our surgery waiting room. It’s designed so that patients don’t need to queue up to merely tell the receptionist they have arrived for their appointment. Although we haven’t formally audited its use, the firm impression of the reception staff is that the 70-80 year old patients head straight for the machine, recognising that its use will allow them to rest their weary legs quicker, whilst your average 20 year old stands in the queue, right beside the machine, and waits to speak to a human being!
And the third example is our use of online appointment booking. Again you’d think that the younger patients would be in the vanguard, but in fact the statistics the company has researched shows that use is fairly evenly spread through the age ranges.
We certainly live in exciting times, and the use of all this technology will become an increasing part of our lives in future years, especially when voice recognition technology, which strangely in my view seems to have lagged behind everything else, catches up and allows us to say, “Add this to Twitter”!
But voice technology is a subject all on its own for another day! More to follow!
