Meekly Merging on to the Super Information Highway

Dave's Joke du Jour: "They're seeking in the OJ case, a jury of impartial people who haven't read the newspaper, who haven't been influenced by the media coverage. I think it will be hard to find twelve Amish people in L.A..."


Miracles used to be when someone came down from the mountains and delivered a bunch of commandments written on stone, or when someone else divided a few loaves of bread into enough to feed a mass of people, or when that same person took some steps on water. Now days, miracles have more to do with the speed and size of computer systems. That's one long, sinewy, and winding road.


SKIPPO! So merge with me, if you will, on to the appropriately named, but scary nonetheless, "super information highway." I know some of you out there are stubborn, determined, Neo-Luddites who continue to deny this is the age where computer knowledge is rapidly becoming the biggest factor in being successfully functional in the business world. But I once walked those same dark corridors as you, and I now count myself not among only the converted, but also among the true believers.


It wasn't too long ago when the truest saying of today's political and consumer driven culture was, "If you don't ride a camel, you ain't Shiite." Now days, that saying is as dated as a Haitian democrat. The world ain't about oil, it ain't about justice or the pursuit of happiness and freedom; nope it's about who controls the access of information, or data. Hard facts.


It was about one year ago when I finally purchased my IBM compatible computer and joined the legions who own the VCR of our day, the PC. It cost a lot of money, and sometimes it is reduced to participating in a game of Mah Jong, but someday, if not already, this baby will pay for itself just in its ability to tap into the vast amount of information that is needed to compete with the versed people, the people in the know, those that devote their time to such matters as 586's vs. 486's.


My friend of faith passed on to me advice as I took on my latest challenge, my change in job status: "Fake it 'til you make it," she said to me. One of the oddest parts of my current other job is that I'm seen as some kind of expert on computer systems. That my friends is a complete mind boggling myth, a complete bomboozelement of the system. Like anything I dare to undertake, I have tried to learn as much as I can, and have succeeded in my own limited terms. But I'm no expert, I can't separate my spreadsheets from my word processing package, my Internet from my e-mail, my laptop from my modem, my mouse from my LAN's.


I have learned enough to be able to e-mail my sister on one coast by somehow punching in my message, sending it to her address on the Internet and hours (though sometimes days) later I get a response. On the other coast I have begun a whole new chapter with destiny's friend, what's her name, finally finding a forum in which to communicate with her on a semi-regular basis. I send off a random musing through my modem, and a bit later she receives it and has the option of reacting. What's disturbing my mind, what stays inside now is electronically communicated with my pal from the past! A mere Ctrl-d. What a kick! Who says the Computer Age has to be cold, an impersonal drift down a pseudo blacktop highway? If it brings us all closer together, who can complain?


This isn't to say we should all just blindly buy into the myth of computers and the convenience of the advances our society develops. I, for one, despise fax machines. I just see them as another way to avoid people (as if telephones and mail aren't impersonal enough). Technology should be questioned every step of the way. I do believe however, that those who forsake what's going on out there because of a desire for the past, a need for things to stay the way they are out of the mere comfort of familiarity, for the way things used to be, are exactly the ones that will be steamrollered over, who will be lost when the kids come up with even more startling advances. We have nothing to fear but the power of who controls the information itself.


How does this apply to our organization? Dare I say we might begin looking into computerizing ourselves? I know it's a suggestion that has been mentioned before, but I have truly come to see that the benefit of computers isn't merely the convenience. The benefit is being able to do things that we once thought, and once truly believed couldn't be achieved in our lifetime: the ability to keep track of things, to organize information and our thoughts, to communicate on a broad and effective bunch of wires and chips.