What is the most frustrating aspect of modern technology?
The pace of change in scholarship that we should be teaching. In the past, scholarly publications came out at discrete points in time such as every three months. If we put learning materials on library reserve at the beginning of the semester, the materials probably were relevant for the entire semester. Now thousands upon thousands of scholarly publications are put on the web every day. There are search engines to help us and electronic media to signal what appears where, but each morning we awaken to a whirling blizzard of new happenings in our discipline. Many papers, especially those of Bob Jensen, are subject to change at any time. What you printed yesterday may be changed if and when you assign it for your students to read. Unless we accept being stamped “blissfully out of date,” we will perpetually live at a pace that ruins our fingernails, harms our families, impairs our diets with fast foods, reduces friendships to email messages, creates encounters as fleeting as passing trai
Big Google is watching your every move Microsoft faces constant scrutiny for the data it collects–or might collect–on its customers. Four years ago, when the company introduced “product activation” to stem piracy, privacy advocates cried foul. Likewise, Microsoft proposed technology code-named HailStorm as a way of consolidating login information for multiple sites; privacy concerns eventually scuttled that proposal. Google regularly gets away with this kind of thing. According to its privacy policy, Google explicitly reserves the right to track every time you click on a link from one of its searches. If you use Gmail as your primary E-mail–and many people do–Google keeps a repository of all your E-mail and indexes it for marketing purposes.
Related Questions
- In a recent essay ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm ), I asked the following question: What is the most frustrating aspect of modern technology?
- What government policies might make sense as technology continues to accelerate?
- What is the most frustrating aspect of modern technology?
