DIGITAL LIFESTYLE
I forget where I have written about this before, so if I am just repeating myself just skip this post. At this point and I thinking about going to Greenville, SC, on Saturday to buy a new iPhone. But what I want to wonder about the shift to a computer based digital life style which is turning the world upside down. This new digital lifestyle is something that we are all wrestling with. One thing that is certain is that it is changing almost everything.
Of course this must have happened all through human history, again and again and again. The other day when my tire went flat in Marshall because two screws were embedded in it, it occurred to me that 150 years ago that I wouoldn’t have had this problem. For most people to get around at all 150 years ago they would have been on foot as I see so often when in rural India. Those well to do people who could afford it would have had a horse and a carriage. They would have had to care for the horse, feeding and watering it and reshoeing it every once in a while. A 20 mile trip to visit Marshall would have taken most of a day and any trade with Marshall would have done with a horse drawn cart or by river boat. The gasoline engine created tremendous change, but so did the steam engine, so did electrification of cities and homes which happened comparatively recently. Air travel happened in my lifetime. The radio and television changed the way people connected to the world. So technological change isn’t something recent. We have been living with it for hundreds of years.
But we seem to have forgotten all of that if we were ever aware of it. It is rapid change right now caused by the computer that is discombobulating us. It was only day before yesterday that I shifted from a landline where long distant calls were difficult to make to having a computer in my pocket which allows me to call anywhere in the world from anyplace.
The rapid technological change we are going through now both causes us great difficulty by upending global economic patterns that cause loss of factory jobs in the United States but greatly benefit places like China or India which not long ago were considered basket cases with no way out of poverty and famine. Some people are threatened by the new technology and others are given new economic opportunities and greatly expanded ways of living more fully.
My barber and his community have lost factory jobs to distant lands and feel they have been invaded and threatened by liberal life styles and values. But those of us not involved with factory jobs have benefitted by new jobs in the knowledge economy and inexpensive computers and phones and all kinds of devices that enrich our lives. Goods from China and other places abroad through Amazon and Walmart have greatly increased the buying power for some of us while at the same time destroying jobs for others of us. And it is these new devices, the proliferation of sources of information beyond the newspaper and mainline television such as Fox News that has stoked the polarization that has so intensified and divided us.
So my question for myself as I wrestle with this is what in the new technology allows me to live a much richer life and what in the new technology threatens the quality of my life and of the communities in which I live. I have great difficultly figuring this out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 