"Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?"

A quick evaluation on whether a technology is good or not. That is a pretty short evaluation and I like it (it's short, it's powerful and it meets my 3 second attention span requirement). I got this from a Mike Rohde blog entry that was referring to a Howard Rheingold article quoting an Amish person as to why cell phones are okay for them. It's got to be causing some conflict for them, remember cell phones are a lot more these days than just phones they are e-mail, web browsers, PDA, video games, calulators, cameras, mp3 players, etc... and some of those functions are standard these days. The Amish aren't the focus of my entry but they are the round about source of the quote.

Back to the quote: "Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" - While it is a nice short evaluation on technology, the continuum between the two ends of the spectrum leaves a lot of grey area. But I've been thinking about it every since I read the entry. Computers (sans Internet) can take people away from the people they know. The Internet can bring them the world but also take them away from people they know. But for some it could be a creative outlet - photography, music, movies, art design. This could be what brings them out.

My question is what are some very clear technologies that fit at one end of our spectrum or another?
There is no research here, I'm just making it up as I go along (so don't get upset with me).

Is the world a better place? 3x Thursday

1. Is the world a better place today than it was 5 years ago? Support your answer. No. I feel the September 11 tragedy and the war and the finances of the country has really hurt us the last few years. Plus we've lost a shuttle our schools are suffering which means so are our children and I'm sure there are more than a few other things that I haven't listed. I know this answer focused on the country and not the world but I don't think they've been making tremendous strides the last five years in the rest of the world. Most five year blocks previously I'd say have gotten better.
2. If you knew what the future held 25 years from now, would you want to continue life to that point even if you knew the outcome wasn't pretty? Why/Why not? Yes! If I had the ability to see the future, I'd have the ability to change it. Heck, even without that power we have the ability to change it.
3. Do you think our elders (we'll put a cap on it and say 65 and older) ever thought the world would be like it is today? What will you tell your grandkids (or your friends' grandkids) about your first 25-30 years on this planet? No, they never imagined it would be like today. It's changed too fast for most of the masses before that time to have guessed. Many of them do not understand the world today. The futurists might have, but they'd be wrong too, we didn't get as far as they thought we would.

   My first 25-30 years? I got to learn as much as I could, I was there when the first computers start coming into peoples homes, we didn't blow up the world, the cold war ended, I remember when no one had cell phones, answering machines or e-mail, I was able to travel when you could show up fifteen minutes before your flight and you didn't have to take your shoes off, I was building web sites before people Yahoo!ed and Googled, we all learned what AIDs was, what computer viruses were and how fast things could really change.