Archiv der Kategorie: Culture

Here you find posts about life styles and mindsets of different countries, indtustrial sectors and business functions.

Creating controllability step by step

A utopia of total control was described again and again in books and movies. Think about 1984 by George Orwell, where Big Brother has control of the most private spheres of life. Or remember Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in which the possession or reading of books is legally forbidden and where the pervasiveness of the mass media in private life is well illustrated. These conceptions of the future that are shown in many science fiction stories provide an unattractive end state that was surely not developed at one go, but gradually. The required bases for such scenarios do not evolve from one day to the other. The whole begins completely innocently, by creating the controllability step by step.

Ueberwachung

The utopias provide only scrappy ideas, if at all, how these controls are created. The following steps show a possible scenario.

  1. Develop appealing offerings
    Everything starts with the technical feasibility. New products and services provide attractive solutions that are becoming by and by affordable for most of the consumers. With the television the unidirectional connection of spectators began. Broadcasts were sent from one sender to many receivers. With the Internet we have the bi-directional connection between many senders and many receivers. In this case there is also data transmitted that does not serve the actual purpose (e.g. duration, frequency and the interests of the users). On this basis further applications are possible, like the navigation system, cashless payment or the electronic passport. These applications transfer more and more confidential data.
    The users are thereby bound into the future control system, without being aware, how much they reveal about themselves.
  2. Free use through advertisement and handing over data
    For high prevalence more and more free or at least cheap offers are made that are “paid” with the supply of data. The users cannot determine, which data is getting exchanged with the data release or the regular update of the app.
    For data fisher men, like the global secret services, it is a smart approach to develop an attractive software that supplies them directly with the appropriate information.
  3. Creating laws and regulations
    This procedure becomes legal by explicitly confirming the terms and conditions of an app by the users – without this confirmation one would not get the software. One suggests security to the citizens by limiting the duration of the data storing and, for example, the necessity for a judicial decision for using the data. This is raising the question, which spies would have ever been made responsible for their illegal bugging and monitoring actions. This makes the juridical question questionable.
    The apparent rule of law is pure sham, as long as national borders and the nearly impossible control of their activities as well as the national self-interests provide the operators sufficient free space.
  4. Facilitating exhaustive tracking
    We weave today inadvertently a close meshed net of our behavior with the introduction of mobile offers, like the mobile phones, computers, navigation systems, location-dependent services and applications for detecting vehicles and packages as well as our individual browsing behavior. And everything can be found in the data storages of the Cloud. Calling a competitor of your employer by phone and the download of internal documents and the trip to this enterprise permit already nowadays unpleasant conclusions.
    The infrastructure is already there. As soon as unscrupulous persons receive the access, we are in a still more terrible 1984.
  5. Abolish alternative offers
    In order to guarantee all this it is helpful that alternative behaviors are no longer available. With the conversion of payphones from coins to calling cards it is any more possible to phone, without storing the connection details. The abolishment of cash, as it is getting real in Scandinavia, makes it impossible to pay, without having the payment documented. The electronic passport guarantees that all border crossings can be evaluated.
    As soon as those aspects of our everyday life are virtualized, everything is in the hand of those, who have control of this system.

This is nota re-narration of 1984, but a list of steps that lead to a pervasive monitor. With a close look, we will recognize that we let these steps already behind us in those regions of the world, where constant supply of electricity and information already exists. Occasional attempts to use these channels with appropriate filters for censorship leak out. This is not a classical end time scenario of conspiracy theoreticians, but our current reality. With the divulgence of governmental secrets by Snowdon, we had to learn that our fantasy is not big enough, in order to be able to imagine the current practices.

Bottom line: We already overhauled the utopia of George Orwell with today’s technical possibilities. The controllability of all people is technically possible today. If the scruples of those, who have the control, continue to disappear or control is taking over by a strong power, we will be in the position of Winston Smith – only with drastically expanded consequences.

The handwriting

The invention of the writing changed the world and our thinking. Writing and copying were related to a large manual effort for thousands of years. While paper represented the memory for thoughts for a long time, nowadays information is saved in virtual, electronic storages. Even if speaking and writing recognition become more and more reliable, contents are inputted particularly with all kinds of keyboards. Currently Finland wants to use keyboards at school at the expense of handwriting. How long can the handwriting survive in competition with ubiquitous ten-finger and one- finger systems?

Handschrift

Learning how to write is closely connected to reading. That way you discover letters, syllables, words, sentences and eventually complete texts. From my point of view the personal writing competency can be developed at best with the right mix of handwriting and typing. The sales of classical providers of writing tools, like Faber Castell and Moleskine, rose in four years around approx. 40 percent. Nevertheless it is worthwhile to be aware of the pros and cons of handwriting.

The following problems stress the use of handwriting.

  • Hand written texts are more difficult to decipher than printed ones. In order to achieve a readable handwriting, regular practice is needed, just like for error free touch typing. Although the handwriting offers, contrary to the many thousand fonts that are available in the computer, fewer variations, it is nevertheless often less readable.
  • Beyond that the handwriting uncovers not only content of a text, but also the writer’s personality. Those moods do not become visible in the type written texts except if you use a mechanical type writer.
  • A disadvantage of writing by hand is the fact that during the writing you depend on your personal language competency, vocabulary and orthography. The automatisms of the computer, like the spellcheck and autocomplete as well as always available thesaurus, extend the quality of the texts also for less experienced writers.
  • In order to eventually copy or send a handwritten text to many people, you can only manually copy or photocopy and forward it as a classical letter, electronic fax or by other technologies.

The advantages of writing by hand are however the following aspects:

  • As soon as you know the handwriting, it is everywhere available, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Analogue tools, like pencils, ball-point pens, chalk, fountain pens, but also a blunt nail on any surface provide the opportunity to write independent of electricity or network.
  • Writing by hand is possible without any time delay. No computer equipment must be switched on or an operating system to be started. At the same time you can change by hand fast from letters to numbers, to signs or drawings.
  • With the handwriting you are able to express your mood besides the content of the text. Thus, handwritten becomes a personal means of expression. Naturally this creates also obligation, since writing personal texts cannot be delegated.
  • The writing by hand fosters the remembering of contents. Through the embodiment of the writing contents are better stored in the mind.
  • The writing by hand is a motoric talent, like piano playing, driving a car or sketching. Also the general development of the brain is fostered by the regular exercise of such talents. The personal handwriting works accordingly.

Bottom line: The writing by hand is an ability like eating with knife and fork or chopsticks. There are good reasons to write on computers. But to renounce the development of handwriting at all would strongly limit our capability of written communication.