Wednesday, August 24, 2005

the need for immediacy and our reliance on technology

While recently on holiday in Rarotonga, the need that we all seem to have developed for immediacy in new technology became very apparent to me. This is in terms of cell phones and internet. After a few days there the need to be in contact with me friends mixed with a bit of boredom saw me going into the little internet and cellphone place. I was told by the man there that yes you can join up to Koka-net, however you must use a Vodafone phone and could only text Telecom numbers, text charge would be the same 20cents, phone calls costing $3 a minute. I stared at him slightly confused and amazed, but agreed and we bought a sim card.
The point of this is that later on we went to the internet cafe to check emails and on my dads email was an email from a friend, subject 'london bombings'. We thought this was a joke, but decided to check the xtra website anyway, a few minutes later (quite literally, and much to our frustration) the website loaded and we found out that yes it was true. We once again waited out the slow connection to read the article, while venting our frustration at the slow speed and I got onto texting, as one of my friends was currently on holiday in London. I text her siser around 6 times that day tryng to find out if this friend in London was okay, getting no reply I was getting very worried. However the next morning she text me saying that yes she was fine, and seemed confuseed about the number of times I had text her all at one time. All of my texts had been delivered at the same time the following morning, around 24hours later. It amazed me that we have become so reliant on technology to communicate, and that New Zealand's development in technology and immediate delivery is actually pretty reliable compared to Kokanet (sorry no offence) but this message delivery 24 hours later happened two or three times.
Our ability to get in touch with people either by phone or through fast speed internet is now in high demand and being somewhat taken for granted. Our demand is being developed to be faster and faster all the time, such as the fast internet Telecom ad with fast Eddie. Meaning that what was seen to be fast internet a few months ago, now seems ancient and slow. Technology development is growing by the day and is now becoming so normal to us that we couldn't imagine life without it, but it makes you think when you can not get that type of access in other countries. So next time you are annoyed at the computer loading for a couple of seconds to long, or a text message taking a couple of minutes to be delivered to someone, just remember how much it has developed and changed from what it used to be.

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