By Vicki McGarvey works in Higher Education in the UK. A librarian with an interest in the open digital world. Blogging on just about anything to do with digital society, as well as libraries
I'm a little bit late with this as we are at the end of week 3 for #EDCMOOC so I need to gain some momentum. In week 2 we moved form "Utopian/Dystopian" views of technology to "Looking into The Future", we were presented with a range of resources that presented images of technology, suggesting, leading, informing, profiling and tracking, as the course said these are evocative and disturbing. As with week 1 the choice of films were excellent, ranging from adverts presenting how technology can enhance our living in the future from Corning "Made from Glass" and Microsoft and "Productivity Future Vision" to technology ruling and intervening in everyday life as in Plurality (resources below). It got me thinking about Graphene developed in the University of Manchester - in fact the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work - and the talk about the potential of this in manufacturing technology devices, now and in future because it is exceptionally thin and strong as well as being an excellent conductor. In the world of nano technology we already have research where computers are made out of strands of DNA, at the Weizmann Institute of Science being led by Tom Ran, as referred to in an article in the Guardian last year on the Future of Computers. Week 2's resources conveyed futuristic views of the power of technology acting on our behalf making suggestions on our behalf, almost implying that technology will eventually have mind of its own. We already can see the power of Cookies recommending related resources in relation to our web activity and the semantic webhttp://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page, which enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and web sites . However, there would be no data without interaction, it is our behaviour which enables data generation, the profiling and the cross-correlations, once we enter the WWW territory we have no choice in the matter, it is too late to turn back.
