One snowy day last week, I spent half an hour talking on the telephone with a stranger located in the south of India. Our conversation did not focus on the horrendous tragedy of the tsunami that hit not far away from where this person lives. Rather, he and I were conferring to install a virus protection program on my computer.
If you share my ineptitude with computer technology, you may well find yourself talking with someone in Mumbai or another Indian city ten thousand miles away. Increasingly, American companies have found it economical to call upon workers in distant countries to provide technical assistance to their customers.
The people you talk with, I have discovered, are remarkably patient and polite. They relieve the anxiety that I suffer when I deal with the often ornery behavior of my computer. Though the conversation centers on matters technical, I often manage to slip in some more personal questions.
Never in my growing-up years, of course, could I have imagined the kind of exchange described here. Nor would I ever have dreamed of becoming addicted to a computer as an indispensable tool in my professional life. Maybe Buck Rogers did so dream, but the fantasies of that comic strip did not make enough of an impression on youthful me.
This subject flows from a conversation around the dinner table of my extended family on Christmas Day. At a certain point, my siblings and I remembered our beloved maternal grandmother, Hannah Barry, talking about what she had seen in her lifetime.
Looking back in her 80s, she mentioned the automobile and airplane as the two inventions that had most changed the society that she had known. Born in 1864, she knew as an adult a world in which neither of these great technological breakthroughs had as yet appeared.
Two generations later, my siblings agreed about having witnessed inventions just as world-changing. One of my brothers identified the transistor as perhaps the most important of the products that have further transformed our world. The chip that resulted from this breakthrough has given us great benefits in many different fields, medicine being among the most important.
More broadly, we judged the shrinking of both distance and time as the great phenomenon of our era. That we can casually send an email to almost any part of the world and have it reach a person there almost instantly, in itself reduces both time and distance dramatically.
Seeing television pictures of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969 as they were transmitted to people all over the world, while the event was happening, meant the extension of this reach outward into space. I watched this epic event in a small Mexican town that, in its poverty, made the achievement of the moon walk all the more stunning.
The list of wonders can be expanded indefinitely, of course. So much has occurred in the lifetime of every person born before World War II that choosing which ones to mention feels arbitrary. Unfortunately, however, many people around the world hardly share in these benefits. More than one billion children, the United Nations reports, suffer extreme deprivation and have little or no access to modern technology.
If your psyche is like mine, you sometimes feel lost in this brave new world. It operates by a knowledge that is closed off to most of us. There was a time when parents always understood their adult children's jobs; now they assume that they will not.
Much of the world of work remains mysterious to me; my education did not prepare me to understand it. Who can reasonably regret having studied Shakespeare? But a source of high tech know-how he isn’t.
This ignorance can be unsettling because almost everything has become so complicated. We receive Christmas gifts grounded in high tech that come with incomprehensible instructions. Our houses are now filled with technology whose workings escape many of us. When our machines stop dead, we find ourselves befuddled.
Though, like so many others, I often feel at sea, my main emotions continue to be wonder and awe. To the extent that such a feeling can be directed toward mere objects, I love technology. Much of it is maddening, but I feel thankful for the collective and individual genius of people who have brought us the wonders of the contemporary world.
If only we had wisdom to go with these smarts, this new world would be just marvelous instead of only partly so. But 59 armed conflicts took place in this world between 1990 and 2003, most of them within countries rather than among nations.
This new year of 2005 promises more of the same. Let us, however, hope for unforeseen breakthroughs leading to peace as we enjoy the benefits of the great inventions that have marked the time of our lives.
Richard Griffin