It truly has reached that stage now, from all that hype back in secondary school for me. Back in 1997-8, I got my first PC, a Pentium 200 MMX with 32MB of RAM which would lag when I played mp3s and surfed the net at the same time, resulting in the singer going "As long as you love-uve-ove-ove-uve-me-e-e-e-e" (Yes, batten down the hatches me maties, closet Backstreet Boys fan spotted) .
Back then talk was about how the world was to change and take a left at the treatment-of-information crossroads, away from analog towards digital. I was skeptical and didn't think it would work, because I was only using narrowband 56k modem (highly overstated, when bandwidths rarely performed as claimed by ISPs and modem manufacturers), expensive hardware and restrictive software that made it hard to imagine things any better than reading hypertext that look just as boring on-screen than printing it out and making it no different from the analog age.
Then there was broadband and the development went REAAAAlly fast in the next few years to come. It's no surprise, then, that 10 years down the road since my household first started leaning towards the path for technology that things have become convenient, instantaneous, and arguably better.
Comparing the way news is brought to us, we used to have mass media in the form of newspapers, where we can't choose the content that comes to us. But now, technology like RSS and specialized websites give users the option to narrow down the type of information they choose to receive. Back then, those who trade on the stock market have to glue their eyes to their televisions to read the figures on teletext, where hitting refresh doesn't really mean refresh and the next screen might skip what he/she wanted to see.
About the speed at which information travels now, it has changed from how newspapers can at most reflect what happened a day ago, and the faster way to receive news would have been the radio. But then there's no visuals with radio, and we risk bad reception when a plane flies overhead, making us miss the best part.
It's the waterspout incident that sparked off this retrospective compare-and-contrast train of thoughts. Within minutes of spotting it, videos and pictures were already available online, shrinking the Singapore, as we know it, even smaller. Not to spread any undue paranoia, but don't you think it'll also be increasingly easy to be... you know, watched, in the near future?
Just takes a matter of getting used to, just like how before computers, the first thing we wake up in the morning was not to wait for a machine to boot and check emails and log in to Messenger. As people watch us, we can watch people and privacy would take on a whole new meaning with new dimensions.
My own visuals of the waterspout coming right up!
