technology rant

Oh how the world is changing. It cannot be understated how technology is creating a homogenized planet, allowing people from across the world to communicate and interact in unprecedented ways. That this is entirely a good thing, however, remains to be seen.


Certain retailers are using the fact that the majority of marketable people utilize a hand held device of some sort to "get closer to the customer." Emails on sales, discounts, and offers seem to be popping up everywhere. The fact that I am being profiled based on my digital fingerprint is alarming, and more often than not, is off the mark. I can appreciate the fact that businesses are doing there best to mold to what they think are my preferences, and in many ways this does make shopping easier, but sometimes I feel that I would prefer a less invasive method. The WSJ article is interesting in the lengths that some stores are going to in order to make store shopping a continued practice, but online shopping is so much less of a hassle that at some point it may not be worth the amount of time and money spent on the technology. If a mirror could tell me my exact size for a certain garment and profile other clothes I might be interested in, then that might be an idea that I would be interested in, especially if it would reduce the need for terribly harassing salespeople. On the whole, this movement towards an experience that is closer to the specific shopper is inevitable and positive, but I hope certain precautions are taken before going too far.

As far as having an app for my phone that tells people my location, I am powerfully against it. While this does seem novel and useful, I really don’t want people to know where I am at all times. It is somewhat scary to think that we live in a society that has an app that can tell where you are. How much control can we give technology? It may seem like a Hollywood fantasy, but how unfeasible are ideas like terminator and the Matrix? If technology is given such increased control, who is setting the laws on where it stops?

My final rant is on how technology is homogenizing the world. I am all for the continued advancement of communication. Google and Skype have now made it cheap and easy to talk around the world. This is great, but at some point it will aid in the loss of specific culture that will cease to exist with a smaller world. A bad example of this is specific regional accents. When a specific person lives in a society with a vastly different accent from their own, they gradually lose their unique accent as they begin to pick up on the phrases and sayings of their new surroundings. Is this happening to the world as it becomes such a smaller place? You might think not, but I think it is a tragic inevitability to these advancements. How much farther down the road will it be before we have an app that acts as a perfect voice translator for talk between two otherwise non-communicating individuals because of a language barrier? I believe as the need for a second language continues to rise in the world today that this is closer than we think. I look forward to the possibilities of increased communication on a global scale, but hope that it does not do so at the cost of what makes each specific person unique.