I was looking again recently at the Time Magazine’s person of the year issue for 2006. The “person” of the year, the magazine declared, is “you,” meaning all of us. Because of personal computers and the World Wide Web, ordinary people across the globe are contributing themselves to the world – videos on sites like YouTube, diaries on blogs, photos on sites like Flickr. The cover says: “You control the Information Age.”
Twenty-five years ago, Time’s “person” of the year for 1982 was…the computer. A remarkably prescient essay in the magazine reported the explosion in sales of personal computers from such companies as Texas Instruments, Commodore and Atari. It told the stories of doctors, lawyers and farmers who were transforming their work with computers.
All of this was before the Web, of course, but the article hinted at the wonders computers could perform in educating children, assisting doctors in treating patients and mitigating the plight of the poor in developing countries. It noted that PCs were creeping into the workplace, but that many business executives were reluctant to embrace them.
Today children in many remote villages of the developing world are doing their homework on solar-power PCs. Doctors are performing tele-surgery on patients halfway around the world via the Internet. And no business can operate without computers.
But we still haven’t found the key to eradicating poverty. A good education is still just beyond the reach of too many children. Medicine is one of the last fields to fully embrace the digital future. And too many businesses don’t intelligently deploy the computing power available to them.
It’s a much better world – I wouldn’t want to go back – but it’s curious how we still wrestle with some of the most basic issues. You would think we could have figured some of this out by now.
