Die Schatenseite

Ich habe gerade einen Text von Douglas Adams (dem Autor des ‚Anhalters‚) gelesen, den er 1999 über das Internet geschrieben hat. Der Text trägt den Titel How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.

Beeindruckend fand ich die folgende Definition. Es geht um die Feindlichkeit, die neuen Technologien bei ihrer Einführung meistens entgegenschlägt:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Angesichts meines fortschreitenden Alters (ich würde mich bei Punkt 3 befinden) hoffe ich einfach mal, daß diese Regeln nicht auf die Leute zutreffen, die landläufig Geeks genannt werden…

Noch ein Highlight:

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‚technology‘, and ‚technology‘, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ’stuff that doesn’t work yet.‘ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.