Age of technology
By Lee Hyon-chol
In the age of smartphones, some knowledge we learned at school seems to have become outdated and has faded.
That's why a 66-year-old mother given a new smartphone for her birthday visited the phone company some time ago and told the office worker that she would pay her monthly fare by the “four gram” system instead of saying 4G. The worker was wondering what this was all about but soon realized she meant 4G after reading a memo her son wrote for his mother.
Semiconductor chips in phones are developed quickly with the capability to process a huge amount of information. So now new units of information processing have appeared such as mega, giga, tera, peta and exa.
I think the people of my age are living in a peripheral or transitional time.
In the past, everything was comparatively slower than now. Buses or trains were slower than those now running on highways or on highly advanced railroads. The news was also delivered rather slowly in comparison with the speed and quickness of today. Quickness after all is due to the power of semiconductors upgraded a thousand times in a few years.
There is superabundance beyond the extent to which we can manage to follow. So much information or knowledge is available ubiquitously. That's how I have so many pieces of information about friends, message pals, Kakao-talk friends, and BAND friends in my phone. Whenever I want to look up a phone number, I just type two or three initial letters of my friend's name and it shows me the full name and phone number and photos of them in no time.
At the moment I am having fun thumbing with one of my pals and sending some pictures I took with my phone. If you want any information, you name, it will show up surprisingly quickly.
Sometime in the future, of course, a new coinage of units or abbreviations will take the place of even the units used these days. Perhaps by that time I will be having either a nice or a hard time learning how to use the latest phone model, knowing the new units by rote.
I will not sleep easily tonight wondering what the future will be like.
Lee Hyon-chol (eleichc@hanmail.net) was an adjunct professor at the Teachers' College in Kyungnam University, South Gyeongsang Province.