WITHIN THE FAMILY
Technology is All Around Us
By Alex Sachare

Am I the last person on this planet without a cell phone?

Don't get me wrong, I am not a Luddite. I enjoy gadgets as much as anyone and am perfectly willing to embrace new technology. This is being composed on a nice Dell computer that hardly ever crashes, in the latest version of Bill Gates' Word, and will be zapped electronically to our designer down on the Lower East Side.

Yes, I can program the clock on my VCR so it's not constantly flashing 12:00; sometimes I can even coax one of my two machines into recording a program (which, of course, I'll never have time to watch). I was happy to ditch my slide rule in favor of those newfangled "pocket" calculators that were so big, as I recall, the only pocket they fit into was on a kangaroo. I went out and invested in an electric typewriter so I could write my senior thesis without having to pound each key. And I still say the IBM Selectric was one of the great machines of modern civilization.

Don't try fooling me, either. No eight-tracks have ever crossed my doorstep. Yes, Beta or VHS had me stumped for awhile, but I came out on the right side of that one, too.

Cell phones are different. I'm thinking of getting one just for emergencies, but otherwise I plan on keeping it turned off. I value my quiet time, and neither need nor want to be reachable 24/7. Whatever it is, it can wait.

It drives me crazy when I see somebody zooming along a highway at 70 miles an hour, cell phone to the ear. Hey, I just want to get home in one piece. If your conversation is so important, pull over!

I was at a meeting a few weeks ago, listening to a speaker about a subject I wanted to learn more about, and every few minutes I was subjected to the discordant chirp or bothersome beep of one cell phone or another. At least five of them must have gone off in various parts of the room. If my train of thought was derailed, I can only imagine how the speaker felt.

The kicker was that the speaker was discussing one of Columbia's ventures in the digital technology world, the very world that blessed us with those little noisemakers!

Which brings us to this issue of CCT, featuring the first part of a two-part series on digital technology. It's a big topic and we can't possibly touch all the bases, but we hope this series gives you a feel for the impact it is having on the way students learn, teachers teach and Columbia is run.