The computer.

The computer is without doubt the most amazing of mans inventions, but its long term influence on society has yet to be understood. In South Africa alone we are expected to have over 4 million users online by the year 2012. Just why has the computer experienced such phenomenal growth?

The reasons are quite easy to understand. The computer offers us a world in which we can control our own needs. An environment of instant gratification in which we get answers to all out questions without fear of looking stupid. A platform to communicate via text or speech without ever having to come face to face with the people involved. We can produce business documents, and graphics. Watch or produce DVD films and create or listen to music. Play games. Do our banking, and pay the bills. And then there is the most popular web search of all…Pornography. What more can I add to convince you that Cyberspace is the place to be. Or is it?

I agree that on the surface it sounds like paradise, but let’s take a closer look at what’s happening in reality. Let’s start by analyzing why anybody would host a website in the commercial world we live in today, unless it was for commercial reasons. So I assume it’s safe to say that the majority of sites are there to sell you something, and that the information you are getting is mostly biased towards persuading the reader into buying something. So in actual fact the Internet is nothing more than an advanced ‘Yellow Pages’ designed to convert your interest into hard earned cash. This has now been refined into the most advanced marketing tool called Google Adword and the Google page ranking system. Let me try and explain in layman terms how it all works. There are for instance 240,000,000 odd web pages with some relevance to art on the internet, so what Google have done is attach a cost per click to each word combination used to search this quagmire of information. If you want a good page ranking for your Google Adword campaign for say the words ’Contemporary art.’ you would land up paying R34.00 every time someone clicked on your ad. What it boils down to is this…Only your large companies with high profit margins can afford the visibility necessary to promote themselves online. The more clicks they get the higher their page ranking. The higher their page ranking the easier they are to find on the search engine. Nobody offering solid helpful information for nothing stands the slightest chance of ever being discovered. It is in fact exactly the same as magazine and newspaper advertising. My big gripe is that the internet was meant to be for the people by the people, but it has been hijacked by Google and all the other search engine pirates. The question here is whether we want our new cyber world controlled by the greed of commercialism or as a pure platform for the exchange of information and ideas.

Now let’s move on to the various communication formats available. The big problem with these possibilities is that firstly they are not face to face, which will ultimately lead to a lack of ability in reading peoples facial expressions during conversation. Research has been done on this aspect, which clearly shows that face to face intercourse clearly shows that facial expressions can communicate forgiveness and empathy that would not necessarily be conveyed by the written word.
The reliance on text only could also result in the lose of ‘long hand’ writing skills, which would spell the end of the personal touch of ‘thank you’ letters.
A sad world indeed.

And if we take a look at the effects the computer has had on business and industry, we can only come to the conclusion that it is singularly responsible for the lose of millions and millions of jobs. A similar scenario is busy happening in the fields of film making, music, writing and art, as internet piracy continues to steal the meager profits necessary to promote the up and coming artists of the future.
Game playing is probably the second most popular online activity, and in my opinion has done nothing but promote violence and stop children from inter reacting during healthy outdoor activities like sport. If things continue in this way I can see the Olympic Games having to introduce events like ‘The fastest finger.’ ‘The computatholon.’ and that popular crowd pleaser ‘The hackers 100.’ Nothing to laugh at when one reads that three out of every five American children have been diagnosed as obese.

Internet banking is another rather dubious online activity. What with the amount of scam artists developing ever more sophisticated methods of scanning your hard drive for banking details I would be very wary of transferring my children’s pocket money. And if you have ever read the small print on those online banking agreements you would see that you are personally liable for protecting your pin number, but what chance have you got against a Trojan horse or some worm or other?

And then finally we come to the most popular online activity called Pornography. Just how low will they go to get our attention? I don’t believe there is a single human being male female straight or gay that can resist the wide variety on offer. That’s why they call us Homes Erectus. But be that as it may there are two ways of looking at this activity. Firstly as a driving force that makes you take yourself in hand, or secondly as a mild stimulus provoking nothing more than wishful thinking.
Which leads me to believe that it is better to be a wishful thinker, than allowing the computer to make a total wanker out of you?

To summarize let me sketch a picture of what the world might look like in twenty years time if we make cyber space our new domain…

A rather podgy fat fingered pale faced man sits mesmerized in front of his SyncMaster 750 computer screen. He has all the time in the world, because it has been years since he was last employed. He remembers the days when he was married, but unfortunately his wife did not appreciate the amount of time he spent on the computer. She called it an addiction, but what else was there to do with your time. Fortunately his children still contacted him via ‘Face book’, which was at least better than not seeing them at all. There was no longer any sport to play, because everybody now played their own games online, where they could become their own hero’s, which was a lot more self fulfilling. What more could he ask for in life? Okay his migraines had increased in frequency and intensity, but he was getting free treatment online. That was the great thing about living online…you could read up on all possible diseases, and then decide whether you had any of the symptoms or not. He never missed the physical contact of being married either, because today you could just log in to ‘Lovers online’ connect to the ‘full contact’ mode, attach the ‘orgasmotron add on’s’ Adjust your preferred ‘real time monitor’,and…shazam! You’d reached the capacity of your stiffy drive. You just can’t compare cyber sex with the real thing. Or can you?

The choice is still yours.