Technology: The blessing & the curse.

At one point I seriously thought this would be the piece that would be responsible for my bowing out of the challenge. As soon I read the topic for the day my mind already has a clue on how I will traverse. This one had me perspiring for a while, until viola the piece was done. I hope I didn't blub😬. I always try & make it a point not to assume anything. So I looked up the definition of technology & I have to say I was intrigued. "The organization of knowledge for practical purposes" according to my Livio offline Dictionary. All the definitions I came across stem from the aforementioned notion & we have aced it in this regard. Men on the moon, 3D printed bones restoring hearing, genetic engineering, cloning & AI. It's the 21st century & almost everything is instantaneous. Communication, travelling, information, the barriers have tumbled like the walls of Berlin. All these deity like inventions come with God like responsibilities as well. For me it cant be either or, it's both, the blessing & the curse. Tech has made life easy, way easy. Communication especially, the whole world is literally in the same room like that. We are in Greece, Venezuela, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Sudan protesting, voicing our concerns in unison with them & casting light to the plight of the masses. It's been a trait of authoritarian regimes to shut down social media platforms when there are wide spread protests, their heavy handed responses, human rights violations & lack of emphaty make it around the world in no time. Now, we cant have the children airing the dirty laundry now can we. We are millennials querying the status core, cultures we have adopted & the discrimination that come with them, seeking transparency & holding political incumbents to account, advocating for virtuous causes across the world from the palm of our hands. We cant even imagine days without the internet & social media. Any disruptions would send millions shacking.

There was a pioneering surgical procedure using 3D printed middle ear bones at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Tshwane, South Africa. Let that sink in. 3D printed bones, hearing restored. If that's not a wow in your book I don't know what will be. We now have cellphones that take images similar in quality to those taken by professional cameras, I mean we might down play the tech advancements because of our proximity to them, because they have become a given but boy tech is just wow. Now it's easy to capture ill happenings as they occur, way easier to disseminate even. One would think this might deter villains but nope, crime statistics are on the up & up sadly. You have to admit living in the 21st century is blissful.

The internet bundles the world up for you & places it in the palm of your hands. Traversed library isles are now swipes & downloads in the blink of an eye. It brings the good & bad to the comfort of your home. You can indulge your proclivities to your fill, gambling, pornography et cetera. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) can strike a target within a 10 000-km range in 30-35 mins, with terminal speeds of 5 000 m/s & are primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads). 😴 wooooow. That's one of THE scariest stuff I have ever heard. Remember that world I said was in the same room conversing, it can be gone just like that. Yup technology at your service.

Cambridge Analytica scandal, Christopher Wylie was the whistle blower who let in the world on Facebook's shenanigans about privacy violations. Facebook data of millions of users was collected & manipulated for political ends. Psychological profiling they called it. It's worth mentioning "citizen four & Edward Snowden" in the same breath. Snowden shed light on a plethora of covert NSA wiretapping surveillance programs that harvest data from unsuspecting internet users, how fibers optic cables the world over are tapped to intercept data. This is the only stuff we know, yet. The internet has an indelible memory & for some reason we seem to forget that, we seem to forget it can be easily manipulated as well. For some odd reason we love trusting it with our lives. WhatsApp is for free, or is it? Information is money, big monies apparently & the masses are accomplices because we never interrogate anything, gullible & naive to some extent. 15 minutes outrage on social media that evanesce without concrete changes & life moves on. Maybe we don't want to know, we have a lot to deal with anyways. It has become evident civility is a causality of the "world being in a single room" concept. As much as they allow us to come together, the social media platforms also foster unhealthy tendencies. In the search of "likes", civility is almost always the first victim. We occupy the same virtual space but not the same physical sphere, in a way this detaches us from the moral responsibility we sometimes accord a person just because they are next to us & we have looked them in the eye. Vitriol seems to be an acceptable manner in which to converse & usually with more "likes". Far from our eyes & lives are our actions have consequences, we maim & ruin lives without regard. Anything for likes & a bit of notoriety.

With deity like inventions come the God like responsibilities. We seem to be the fascinated with upside of this bilateral relationship only. There will always be a ying/yang relationship as far as I see it when it comes to the pros & cons of technology. Photocredits:Google, istockphoto.com #DayNo8 #Tech #Blessings&Curses @AfroBloggers