One in a series.
Somewhere in the archives of The Harvard Crimson is a photo of me taken in September of 1984. I was sitting at the end of a row of Apple Macintosh computers in the new computer room in the basement of the Harvard Science Center.
These were the original 35-pound beige plastic machines with a 16 megahertz processor running 128 kilobytes of random-access memory with no hard drive; you were limited to whatever you could stuff on one side of a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk.
Right now, I am typing this blog entry on a mobile phone which weighs about six ounces, and has a 1 gigahertz processor running 512 megabytes of random-access memory with 16 gigabytes of space.
I’m not expecting you to know the order of magnitude of improvement for all of these items.
But what I know is that, if you wanted to built an iPhone out of the kinds of tubes and wires that formed the core of the Aiken Mark I that is still on the Harvard campus, you would need a space about 38 million times the size of the Aiken to house it.
That’s the leap forward in technology the last quarter-century.
Technology, of all kinds, has had a number of effects on our society. It has made our nation one of citizen journalists (cat videos and celebrity social media users notwithstanding), it allows cars to self-adjust fuel mixture, it allows people to email entire documents like contracts to each other, and it helps in life-saving surgery.
Many of the technologies are things we have seen in popular culture such as Star Trek, The Jetsons, the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, Metropolis, and The Fifth Element.
But it has also created a number of unintended consequences. A generation of teenagers thinks it is OK to post nude pictures or videos of themselves on social media or send them via mobile phone. The 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments of our Constitution have been enervated in the name of “homeland security.” There are hundreds of television channels available to most of us, but often without original content. Many houses today are built without land lines for telephone access.
One social trend that I find interesting is that our all-encompassing technology has created a group of people seeking refuge from it. A number of people our age are not only not wired into the digital public square, there are some folks who consciously avoid giving out any kind of information that could potentially result in them being found by random people. You may get an idea of the breadth of the problem by seeing how many blank entries there are in The Red Book.
At the same time, however, some billion-dollar companies have been formed all in the name of what is being called “social media.” This kind of media has evolved with different names: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, amongst others.
Social media and technology, as has been argued in the fine Robert Putnam book Bowling Alone, has had the dual effect of connecting as well as isolating us. The person who may feel that sense of euphoria connecting with a long-lost friend or teacher may have spent the hours searching in front of a desk at home, alone, and from society at large.
I’m sure the technophile/technophobe dichotomy will shift and evolve over time. I wonder what intervening classes show when it comes to people not wanting to leave their digital fingerprints?
