Off the Cyber Shelf

Last evening on John Stewart's The Daily Show, Bill Gates introduced Windows new operating system, Vista. The program was an excellent opportunity for Gates to reach his target audience of young professionals, who mainly make up The Daily Show's audience base, and tote his new product. Myself a Mac user, I hadn't even heard of the product being released anytime soon, just hearing wispers about its beta from last year. Though it wasn't the new operating system which caught my attention during the interview. Instead, it was the discussion the two men had on the future of technology.

Gates is still adamant that their technology will completely revolutionize the way people communicate in the next five years. The model he presented continues to fuse the cyber world with current forms of media distribution, invisioning a You Tube that will become more of a "You Couch Potato.com."

Since the Internet began to take off in the private sector, a little over ten years ago, I've been waiting for the world to be transformed into some hi-tech machine. Indeed, computers have revolutionized much of the way we communicate and discover information. But I would not say that it has completely changed the way the world looks. It maybe has changed how I spend my free time, and not always for the best--getting lost on Wikipedia when I use to sit back and read a book. But, other than the MacBook in the corner of the room, compared to the old Apple IIC I had in the mid 1980s, I can't say that my home has been completely transformed. I still prefer television to You Tube, and I'd take a movie on the big screen over one on my Ipod anyday.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy, and I'd say that beyond the novelty factor, there's very little that has completely blown me away the past twenty years, as far as hi-tech. True, Google and Wikipedia have made my life easier, and I know much more about how frank Zappa recorded his early records. But this information could have been transfered as text with simple images on computers more than twenty years ago. So I still can't see how Gate's prediction for the next five years can be so bold. Even Stewart argued that at the end of the day, he just likes to come home and veg, not be an active participant.

So, instead of clammering around web sites to learn about all the new Vista features, I'm just sitting back and looking at the clear blue sky over New York Harbor, thinking about how easy life probably was in the seventeenth century, when a crash would have meant that you had washed up on the shores of Long Island.