By Jim Selman | Bio
Jerry Mander is a kind of technology prophet. As an ex-advertising guru he ‘got religion’ and in 1977 began to herald the dangers of technology in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In his 1992 book, In
Tag Archives: technology
Why is this the best time to be alive?
By Jim Selman | Bio
Being alive at any time is preferable to the alternative. However, as the years go by, I am increasingly appreciative of the extraordinary time in which we are living. I don’t mean this as some sort of a “Pollyanna” platitude, but as a serious reflection on our world and who we are becoming at this particular time in human history. I believe that what is happening today is analogous to what people who were conscious and aware of what was happening experienced in
Dealing with Vision Difficulties & Computers
Many of us–the vast majority of Boomers in fact–deal with the trials and tribulations of vision loss. Corrective lenses address some issues, but not all, which is why some opt for SMILE eye surgery or similar to surgically correct their vision. Not everyone can have access to this for various reasons though, so those still struggling with vision loss need a solution. Reading glasses can help focus on things
Cooking and the Generation Gap
By Sharon Knoll | Bio
Cooking with my daughter, Krista, is bliss. We were making Crabby Crabcakes, an incredible recipe from Mark Bittman at the NY Times. They were 99% crab with a little bit of stuff we purchased at the Queen Anne Farmers Market to hold them together: brand new potatoes baked with olive oil and rosemary, and sautéed summer squash and caramelized onions with herbs. (Can you stand it? Are you ready to rush out and cook and enjoy the wonderful tastes of fresh grown
The Promise of Networking
By Jim Selman | Bio
Do you remember when networks of computers first arrived on the scene? Moving information onto the new technological platform decentralized and dispersed information and knowledge, a move that resulted in a significant communications revolution that still has repercussions today. Giving people the ability to access and share what had previously existed only on paper or in the minds of certain individuals not only sped up the rate of transactions, but also freed individuals from a certain amount of manipulation.Some resisted the move to computers, feeling threatened by what they perceived as a loss of control—they equated giving up the ‘management’ of ‘their’ information and knowledge as a threat to their power. Ironically, organizations eventually embraced computers as a means to ‘manage’ knowledge, creating complex online systems to store and share the experience and expertise of their employees.
We’re now witnessing an
Rate of Change
By Jim Selman | Bio
I came across an extraordinary six-minute YouTube video called ‘The Shift’—a presentation that blows one’s mind with factoids about the rate of change in the world. The Shift they are talking about is a ‘paradigm shift’, meaning our entire worldview, indeed our whole reality, is being turned upside down and inside out by virtue of technology, population and the exponentially accelerating rate of change. Whether we like it or not, our ‘new reality’ challenges our commonsense and conventional wisdom with ideas like “Knowledge is becoming obsolete before you learn it”.Joel Barker sold a videotape in the 1980s called “Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms™” in which he showed that the world is always a function of our interpretation of it and that, from time to time, for a variety of reasons, the world transforms in ways that are difficult to impossible for people to fathom when it is happening. He is generally upbeat about these periods of dramatic change and asks
Virtual Giving
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Usually we think of the inevitable convergence of technologies as being beneficial for the majority of people using them. Take the introduction of video to the internet, or the internet to the cell phone, for example. As soon as we discover something that works that people want, then the advertisers and marketers are on the bandwagon, looking for opportunities to sell within the new medium. What has me shaking my head today is the obvious marketing spin on ‘virtual gifts’,
Learning from the Internet Generation
By Jim Selman | Bio
My daughter wrote a blog yesterday (A World of Performance) about how technology can move us further and further away from human-to-human connections. I thought “Wow, I would never have thought about that at her age”. Her reflections about what is happening to us as human beings were insightful, but also very useful to me. I have been promoting use of technology to connect people and never imagined