Recent events in Egypt have really made me question some issues as it relates to technology. It's pretty common knowledge by now (for anyone who has read my blogs) that I have a fundamental concern with technology is that that we're overly dependant on it.
With the recent political crisis in Egypt, the government has decided to unplug the whole country from the world. Yep - that's right. They have pulled the proverbial plug on the Egypt that is wired. The rationale is that it by doing this, they are preventing the dissemination of reports and images coming out as a result of the mass riots. I am very hardly a political person, so I cannot comment on how legitimate this is.
However, there's a couple of things here that caught my attention.
First of all, when the plan was initially put in place, the government decided that the everything would be shut down, with the exception of the stock markets. Ironically, after the markets lost 10% because of the instability, they put a freeze on them too. This makes me wonder - what other aspects of the Egyptian infrastructure were not considered to be exempt from this unpluggage? It's mind-bogging, unfathomable.
I don't think that it would be possible here in Canada to unplug the country in the same way. Well - I guess anything is possible, but the number of Internet entry points must be magnitudes greater than in Egypt. What I wonder is if this were done here, how can that be? I can't imagine our society having the magic carpet of the Internet yanked out from under our feet. What would the hospitals do if they needed to communicate with a colleague or to look in medical journals? How would transportation agencies manage. Banking - let's not even get into the impact of the banking sector if there were no Internet access.
As I alluded in a recent post, should something "happen" to our technology, it would clearly be catastrophic in all areas of our society, but we would adapt, that's what we do.
I'd be totally fascinated to see how the populace of Egypt has managed to adapt.
No comments:
Post a Comment