Keeping up with the Internet

By Roshan Doug on Apr 14, 08 05:16 PM in Politics

When I was a student - in another century - we used to write essays that naturally became longer and longer as we moved up the academic ladder. It was awful.

Before you started the essay you'd have to make a number of journeys to the library, where you'd flicked through innumerable books and copious lecture notes.

And you can just imagine how cumbersome the job of writing 3000 words was especially as the most technical thing we had was Tipp-ex! With pen and paper - it really was a tedious, laborious task.

But not today.

The pace of change in our world is truly remarkable - particularly when it comes to IT and the internet.

For instance, I don't know whether you read our editor's recent blog about the latest communications fad, the concept of twittering.

It's very similar to the MSN that Hotmail offers - except twittering is instant and enables you to develop 'followers' and create a following of your own. That might sound like I know what I'm talking about, but I don't... (And incidentally, 'creating a following' doesn't mean you're trying to become a messiah or developing a weird cult of some kind - or at least, I don't think it does!)

Twittering is amazing.

Chatting to someone on the computer from anywhere in the world might seem a little geeky to some people, but it's the way communication is going especially in the world of news and broadcasting.

Anyway, suffice to say that I took Marc's advice and signed up for a twitter account. And within hours I'm chatting to my colleague Joanna - on a Sunday evening, would you believe it? - whilst I'm arguing with my teenage son, watching tv and chatting to someone in Virginia, USA. Similarly Joanna was also busy - multitasking - chatting to me, twittering with someone in Sweden and, working on her essay!

It got me thinking that the idea that we should be doing one thing at a time is becoming a thing of the past. Today everything is immediate - instant - everything is now. And that includes 24 hour news and commentary - visual, audio and print. The pace of change that internet has brought is staggering and continues to amaze me.

And so I wonder if young people, like my colleague Joanna, truly appreciate the beauty of IT and doing essays on the computer with instant access to web-related resources or whether, as I suspect, they take all this wonderful virtual reality world of mass media for granted?

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