Living (and working) the revolution
Christopher Patton - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 7/18/08 Section: Opinions
The world is my office, library, and entertainment center. As long as an Internet connection is available, I can use any computer to access most of my work-related and personal files as well as a significant percentage of humanity's collective knowledge base.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous author and inventor who died earlier this year, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I appreciate the profundity of that maxim daily as the feats I am able to accomplish armed only with my slim laptop and versatile mobile phone would have belonged only in the pages of a science-fiction novel as recently as a few decades ago. And I'd likely get burned at the stake for witchcraft if my electronics and I were somehow transported back a few hundred years into the past. But these technologies remain in their infancy. In coming years, complex tasks requiring more computational power than is currently available to most users, such as rapidly generating high-definition video and audio files, will become trivially simple and cheap.
Though many of my coworkers at The Daily Iowan have suffered through my rants on this topic many times, it took the unfortunate events of this summer to really prove my point. This year's unprecedented flooding has caused such terrible hardship for so many in our community that the difficulties it has created for those of us working for the DI have likely escaped many people's notice. But we have been operating without an ordinary newsroom for most of the summer.
Even as we were reporting on the floodwaters' relentless rise, my coworkers and I got word that the Adler Journalism Building, which is our regular headquarters, would likely flood and thus had to be evacuated. The intense effort everyone exerted in relocating our computers, phones, and other essential equipment to safer locations made me proud to be part of such an organization. Just as we were finishing our flood preparations, I had to dash off to the daily UI briefing on the worsening situation.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous author and inventor who died earlier this year, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I appreciate the profundity of that maxim daily as the feats I am able to accomplish armed only with my slim laptop and versatile mobile phone would have belonged only in the pages of a science-fiction novel as recently as a few decades ago. And I'd likely get burned at the stake for witchcraft if my electronics and I were somehow transported back a few hundred years into the past. But these technologies remain in their infancy. In coming years, complex tasks requiring more computational power than is currently available to most users, such as rapidly generating high-definition video and audio files, will become trivially simple and cheap.
Though many of my coworkers at The Daily Iowan have suffered through my rants on this topic many times, it took the unfortunate events of this summer to really prove my point. This year's unprecedented flooding has caused such terrible hardship for so many in our community that the difficulties it has created for those of us working for the DI have likely escaped many people's notice. But we have been operating without an ordinary newsroom for most of the summer.
Even as we were reporting on the floodwaters' relentless rise, my coworkers and I got word that the Adler Journalism Building, which is our regular headquarters, would likely flood and thus had to be evacuated. The intense effort everyone exerted in relocating our computers, phones, and other essential equipment to safer locations made me proud to be part of such an organization. Just as we were finishing our flood preparations, I had to dash off to the daily UI briefing on the worsening situation.
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