The Information Society
I was particularly drawn to the "Cyberspace and the American Dream" article for this week. The time of publication for this (and the other) article is interesting because some of the issues brought up here were tackled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The article obviously predates this law.
I was fascinated by the use of the phrase "technological sense". Did anyone (including the FCC) ever foresee the possibilities that technology can offer (things like over-the-air HDTV, 3G cell-phone networks/content)? It would seem that most content providers have gone above and beyond what their licenses allowed them to do.
The FCC is about to auction another portion of the spectrum next January. Is the agency or the larger population still able to define it in any particular way that will hold for, say, the next decade? We talked about socio-economic conditions being right for the adoption of technologies. How can we as a society (or the government) plan for technology adoption with such major variables that need to be considered? And how accurate have we been in our predictions thusfar?
Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes in the office without internet access. The break would not have been such a bad thing, if I wasn't bouncing off the walls about not being able to finish my tasks within the stipulated deadline. For all its benefits, how safe is it to incorporate technology as a standard part of the curriculum and without redundancies or backups, especially if we can't live without our "fix" for so much as 10 minutes? Firstly, that could mean canceling the day's class (in itself a great educational and monetary loss).
In purely technological terms, I grew up in the stone ages and can still remember and perhaps relearn to live without computers if the day came. But the paranoid side of me wonders if we're setting up future generations for failure based on how much technology they're served with. Not to mention, this sets up a digital divide across international boundaries, not conducive to a global economy and society.
Enough ranting for now.
I was fascinated by the use of the phrase "technological sense". Did anyone (including the FCC) ever foresee the possibilities that technology can offer (things like over-the-air HDTV, 3G cell-phone networks/content)? It would seem that most content providers have gone above and beyond what their licenses allowed them to do.
The FCC is about to auction another portion of the spectrum next January. Is the agency or the larger population still able to define it in any particular way that will hold for, say, the next decade? We talked about socio-economic conditions being right for the adoption of technologies. How can we as a society (or the government) plan for technology adoption with such major variables that need to be considered? And how accurate have we been in our predictions thusfar?
Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes in the office without internet access. The break would not have been such a bad thing, if I wasn't bouncing off the walls about not being able to finish my tasks within the stipulated deadline. For all its benefits, how safe is it to incorporate technology as a standard part of the curriculum and without redundancies or backups, especially if we can't live without our "fix" for so much as 10 minutes? Firstly, that could mean canceling the day's class (in itself a great educational and monetary loss).
In purely technological terms, I grew up in the stone ages and can still remember and perhaps relearn to live without computers if the day came. But the paranoid side of me wonders if we're setting up future generations for failure based on how much technology they're served with. Not to mention, this sets up a digital divide across international boundaries, not conducive to a global economy and society.
Enough ranting for now.
1 Comments:
Predicting the future is a messy business, but your post reminded me of the feeling of being caught between Second Wave social structures and Third Wave cultural practices. It seems that the ways in which people make use of the technologies available to them at a given time in ways that those in control can't imagine. This gives me some hope that even if planning fails, people will still do creative things with what is available...
By SarahL, At October 2, 2007 10:07 AM
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