“1001110011010” - OpEd

It is time for another in our series on the effect of technology on our life. I am indebted to my grad assistant Craig Knowlton for the research on this article.

Well, that numerical title is either the beginning of the alphabet, the first few notes of the Star Spangled Banner, instructions from your cell phone to your home to turn on the lights, lower the temperature on the first floor and turn on the oven to 350 degrees, the picture of your cat speeding through phone lines and cyber space to your sister in Jakarta, or instructions to an intelligence satellite to photograph a suspicious formation in a far flung land……….. Or it might be all of the above, and that is the point.

Whatever the device, whatever its chore, our communication with it, and its communication with interconnected devices or with its own sub systems is increasingly likely to be in 1’s and 0’s, pulse--- absence of pulse, tone--- absence of tone indicating its dependence on a universal digital key that is wrapping us together ever closer to each other. Small world, big village is today’s reality. The opportunities and challenges we face are increasingly from this digital convergence creating a cat’s cradle of interconnecting lines tying devices together and culture to culture-- whether we are ready or not.

In the future, almost every device will be a network device. Some will be large and immobile, like home entertainment screens, and others will be small and portable, like cell-phones, watches, and digital wallets allowing us to access our financial accounts and arrange for payments for everything from a movie to a house. Given current display technologies, people mostly dislike reading online, but researchers at MIT have invented a new kind of ink that turns a sheet the thickness of a piece of paper into a black-and-white monitor—and they are working on the color version. Extremely high-resolution, reader friendly, screens will one day be everywhere. People will have the capability to carry, perhaps even wear, their computers and use them anyplace, anytime, to send and receive telephone, fax, video, or mail messages.

Some extreme predictions assert that eventually no books, photographs, movies, televisions, stereos, letters, post cards, billboards, telephones, or fax machines will inhabit the average day. Bits, the electronic 1s and 0s that create digital language, are cheaper to produce and store than the cost of cutting down trees to manufacture paper. Instead of paying $30 for a hardcover book, we can read the inexpensive and environmentally friendly digital version. Already many people no longer spend $15 on industry-packaged compact discs; instead they opt to download music directly onto their computer or cell-phone. While I don’t envision production of all tangible information and entertainment objects completely disappearing, one day they could be seen as artifacts more than practical devices. Already libraries feature electronic books and documents so that researchers can access material from around the world. At the College of Charleston, students normally receive teacher handouts via the university network; in this way, they can choose to read it onscreen or print it out.

Nowadays coffee shops, colleges, and private homes and offices feature wireless networks. Downtown Charleston has been promoting its up and coming wireless corridor, and New Orleans has instituted wireless service to help speed emergency service and communication in Katrina’s aftermath. Eventually, a global network of wireless connections will have profound affects on everyday devices that we use. Not only do automobiles access GPS data to provide street maps and car locations, but other products and appliances will access the network as well.

Cable, telephone, and entertainment companies now busily labor towards their digital futures, and eventually the distinction between the television and phone companies will become technological and cultural history. It’s estimated that by 2015, ninety percent of all households in the developed world will have a home media center, which will operate all network transmissions. Computers and televisions will be able to display the same media, so that people will cease distinguishing between them. All information, whether stored data, live streaming sporting events, or downloaded movies on demand, will come from the local—or worldwide—broadband network. People already conduct commercial transactions safely online, whether renting a movie or buying a car and the development of digital watermarks will protect intellectual property and advance business communications as well.

Ian McEwen, the Booker Prize winning author, is currently writing the introduction of a book in which one hundred and forty thinkers, mostly scientists; answer the question “What do you believe that you cannot prove?” While working on this project, McEwen has observed that “They appear to be working towards the formation of a common language. They need each other…The old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge is beginning, only just beginning, to emerge.” Digital convergence is both an immediate reflection and instigator of this worldwide unification of knowledge. Ordinary people will have resources that Caesar Augustus, Thomas More, or Thomas Jefferson never imagined.

There exists in digital convergence the fabulous opportunity for a renascence of human potential. Traditional societies might resist the effects of digital convergence upon their mores and daily life, but the open communication of a global network also promises to expose those traditions to a wider audience. While there will always be much left to prove and more to discover, it seems that consumer and communications revolutions occur daily. While much more enthusiastic about the beneficence of digital convergence for mankind than I am about the risks of nanotechnology which itself reflects the principles of digital convergence, like all change it is not an unmixed blessing. Already it is challenging the third world in ways that are very disturbing to cultures very resistant to change. While the Indian subcontinent may thrive by embracing it, other cultures through their resistance are at the heart of much of the misery that has held back the region and its people and now threatens us oceans away. It is too soon to predict its geopolitical impact, but I suspect that the forces of change are too great for technologically unsophisticated societies to withstand. They will change and sometimes change violently, but our republic is likely to change as well from the digital interconnection of interest groups on all sorts of issues who can more effectively make their wishes known to all levels of our government.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury May 24, 2006. Page 16.

Faith Reaffirmed - OpEd

Life is a leveler. Even for the great, life proceeds as it does for the rest of us, day by day. Their lives like our own consist of routine which in time becomes a rhythm. We are all equal and alike in our mortality, and experience the same aches and joys along life’s journey. We all dream mostly about the people most important to us, those people with whom our involvement provides the meaning for our lives, the mileposts and its measure.

You won’t read this for a couple of weeks, but my family and I have just experienced one of those defining events which gives each of us cause to reflect and catch a glimpse of our life’s meaning. On April 22, my youngest daughter was married to a fine young man here in Charleston.

While feeling joy that two highly principled, loving young adults have found each other and have agreed to face life together, I am keenly aware of the challenges facing today’s families including our own, how temporal and fragile relationships can become when assaulted by the images, speed and complexity of our digital age as well as our own frailties. I could be daunted and afraid for them when considering the forces of discontinuity that will confront them, but I am not. Instead I am strangely comforted by the experience.

The French author Alphonse Karr is reputed to be the source of the famous aphorism, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la mime chose.” (The more things change, the more they remain the same). My comfort comes from that truth. For human beings the successful life is about the values that bind us to our society, and this has been so for at least the last two millennia

In selecting verses to read at their marriage my daughter and her husband, like many before them selected from First Corinthians, Chapter 13, describing the importance and character of love as the core of their relationship with each other.

Writing 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul tells his flock back in Corinth, “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast. It is not proud; it is not rude; it is not self seeking; it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres” Paul ends by reminding the Corinthians “…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love”

Sounds pretty contemporary to me. The whole Book of First Corinthians connects us to our past and is as modern as today. Like our time, theirs was plagued not only by the forces of nature but also by the emptiness of faithless non enduring relationships and the search by men and women alike for comfort and meaning in their attachment. The value to society of The Bible in general and First Corinthians in particular throughout time immemorial is not just its message of our salvation through Christ but its practical, time tested counsel on how to live a satisfying life. It is this practical aspect of ordering of life that made it the favorite reader for our founding fathers.

Paul’s life affirming counsel is as good today as it was then and connects us to our ancestors over a two millennia span of human experience. We can identify with their anxiety, their frailty and their faith. We know innately their resilience and their failures. We are not so different. They endured. We have endured, and our offspring will endure.

From my experience, I would say that not only will they endure but thrive and carry mankind to a better outcome than the society we are yielding to them.

We will yield to them sometimes with protest and sometimes willingly, but we will do so a little bit each day. As we became our parents on some distant day in the past, they are becoming us. Whether we are willing to pass quietly into obscurity and then onto our ultimate reward, they are fully ready and capable of taking the baton and carrying us wherever it is that we are headed.

I was particularly conscious of this passage at the rehearsal dinner when after I had given my father-of-the-bride toast, my daughter, my shy, quiet well behaved daughter stepped forward and just took over. She spoke with conviction, poise and assurance, and it seemed to me that she spoke for the first time as a mature adult and wowed everyone. She had transformed before all our eyes into this benign but powerful presence. I couldn’t have been prouder, and I rejoice with the rest of you who have already experienced a similar life affirming experience.

I continue to be concerned about all the national policy subjects I normally write about. Fiscal irresponsibility, taxation insanity, immigration reform, the war in Iraq, apathy among too many of our citizens, and the everyday assaults on the values about which I write will all return to these pages soon, but today, just today let me share with each of you the hopeful message that all is well. Despite the challenges thrown our way, America and its people will survive and prevail. Our youngsters are more than our equals, and they will find the way.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury May 10, 2006. Page 16.