While it may seem contradictory, as an IT specialist I look upon the digital
age with both excitement and trepidation: new possibilities fraught with new
dangers.
As humans become more and more dependent upon their new digital tools, I
worry that we will forget how to do the real work ourselves (how many people
today can start a fire without a lighter? how many high schoolers can do
long division without a calculator?). I often think back upon one of the
original Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise crew came upon a society
that had become so dependent upon the supercomputer that ran virtually
everything on their planet that, when it began to fail, they were not only
at a loss as to how to fix it, but also as to how to take over the
life-sustaining tasks that it had been performing for them.
Like many speculative fiction writers I've read, I can also imagine a day
when an EMP weapon (electro-magnetic pulse - they already exist, you know)
could wipe out the entirety of a society's digital knowledge base and throw
civilization back into the equivalent of the Stone Age. If you've ever had
a hard drive failure, you are already aware how ephemeral digital data can be.
I also have concerns about committing all of Man's accumulated knowledge
over to corporations. Is anyone out there really comfortable with allowing
Google to become the sole arbiter and storehouse of this information?
Google may seem like a benign giant, but it is a for-profit (monetary
profit, that is) entity and it only takes one CEO with other than benign
intentions to change that. And does anyone really trust Bing (given
Microsoft's track record) to make their information decisions for them?
So I, both digital tool-maker and anachronism, while continuing to
contribute to the new age of information storage and retrieval and to revel
in the possibilities, will also continue to hedge my bets and hoard my own
personal physical library and look to my local library for unfettered,
uncorporatized access to information.
Or, to paraphrase Charlton Heston: You can have my books when you pry them
from my cold, dead hands!
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Mark Vega
Programmer/Analyst
University of California, Irvine Libraries
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Received on Fri May 28 2010 - 11:11:14 EDT