Information Technology & Social Responsibility

Not often were you given a chance to go to a conference and get to meet with a full tank of thinkers.

I attended one today with academic scholars who came from MIT, Fudan, Tsinghua, Drake University, just to name a few and I must say, they possess great minds and perspectives, which really made me the least qualified to speak of the subject matter.

I sat there for a whole day, listened with anticipation on a close-door debate on information technology & social responsibility. The thinkers had their moments to present their research papers, issues were thrown at each other and thoughts were wrapped up by a roundtable discussion at the end of the day.

When I say thinkers - I am sure you could easily imagine and relate how they look like. They are practically - old. Put it this way, older than the norm if you like. To me, they are great thinkers no doubt, but they simply think too much.

Many thinkers appeared today don't use the internet often enough, do not understand what Web 2.0 entails and they definitely question about internet safety and have a sense of their privacy being breached. Those descriptives already posed a biased view from the start and I felt rather disappointed that the discussion just didn't get any further than where we started off with "Whose Responsibility?"

What I think these great minds should be doing, is to continue exercising their brains, but at the same time, engage in all of the followings:-

• go surf the web, upload and download something
• buy reference books from Amazon
• check out the auctions at eBay
• forget about queuing at the bank and transect in the cyberspace

Instead of nagging about the digital divide on how the poor can't access the internet, they should really be spending more time in investigating what's readily available for them from the internet. That would really help balance supply and demand (thus minimizing the digital divide).
I suggest they can own a blog for a start, make themselves heard by contributing articles online to encourage exchange of viewpoints.

Last but not least, the world is transforming and with change as the only constant, they should realise the old rules just doesn't fit the new ruler. In other words, there will always be risks walking on the streets, but does that prevent you from going out? Banks can go bankrupted but does that prevent you from putting money in the bank?

I am very tempted to say to these thinkers - go get a life! In Second Life!