Posted inHealthMedia

The trouble with Dr Google

Things have been a bit tough of late, the bad economy is starting to bite, and you’re feeling the pressure. To top it all, your body has been acting strangely in ways it never has before. Your muscles twitch in funny areas for hours at a time, you tire easily, and you have fleeting pins […]

Posted inMediaNews/Politics

Cyber warfare

In The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005, p. 62), Paul Virilio says the following: “ ‘He who knows everything fears nothing,’ claimed Joseph Paul Goebbels not so long ago. From now on, with the putting into orbit of a new kind of panoptical control, he who sees everything – or almost everything – will have nothing […]

Posted inNews/PoliticsTech

The importance of technology for education

In a globalised economy with a high degree of competition among countries, the success of a nation depends on the educational level of its workforce. This is true not only for those just entering or already integrated into the labour market but also for the unemployed, who may lack the qualifications required by the growing […]

Posted inTech

Tech spreads slowly

This is a story of how my ego taught me a hard lesson in entrepreneurship. I used to work for some really big publishing companies, till in 2006 I left them to co-found an ebook production company. I thought ebook technology was moving fast, and that I was just in time to catch the ebook […]

Posted inLifestyle

Two weeks without the internet

Recently, our household had the misfortune of being stranded with no regular internet service for a fortnight. When I say “no regular internet service”, I mean that our main computer crashed. Stopped working. Showed me the famous “blue screen”. Then committed suicide. I am not one of those fundis who tweet from my cellphone. I […]

Posted inBusinessMediaTech

Imagining web 3.0

This is an extract of a keynote presentation I gave at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre on Thursday, June 21 2012. The advanced development of the internet and the cornucopia of information it provides has only been in existence for just over 18 years. The internet at its current growth rate and development stands to be […]

Posted inGeneral

May the e-force be with us all

The first time I really discovered the sheer, raw power of instant electronic communication over the internet was a kamikaze affair. A friend was being treated very unfairly, I thought, by an organisation we both had dealings with. So I decided that enough was enough; wrote a heavy-duty email about what I thought of the […]

Posted inGeneral

Is Plato’s cave still (virtually) with us?

Every philosophical initiate knows Plato’s allegory of the cave. As some commentators have remarked, it is probably the first imagining of what we know as the film theatre. In Book 7 of The Republic, Socrates tells the parable of a community of people who live in a cave, with their necks shackled in such a […]

Posted inGeneral

Our future with robots

The shape of our technological future is already coming into view, judging by Sherry Turkle’s recent book Alone Together. To be more accurate, if one takes the latest developments in the area of electronic communication, internet activity and robotics, together with changing attitudes on the part of especially (but not exclusively) young users into consideration, […]

Posted inGeneral

Local is lekker: Building communities rather than corporate profits

The internet is the new kaffeeklatsch, a digital clearinghouse of fact, hearsay, humour, folksy wisdom and calculated maliciousness, all in prodigious quantity. The viral email, in turn, is the whisper behind cupped hand of old – rippling with lightning speed through the global village. And, just occasionally, an inspired idea does the rounds. One such […]