Elon University

The Pursuit of Techno-Happiness

We will someday see the [cyber]species that we make as being as beautiful as a butterfly … Our chief chore is taking on the duties and responsibilities of gods … I believe technology is unadulteratedly good in our world, just as life is good on our planet.

Electronic Speech, Press & Assembly

A cloud … is building, a hurricane of over-information that threatens, if it continues, to serve as nothing more than nonsense deforesting large tracts of our national acreage … To focus the amount of information we are producing on a weekly basis, which probably exceeds that produced in most of the preceding centuries, would take an enormous lens, or perhaps a million rather tiny ones.

Superhighway or Dead End?

Take that convergence of the computer and the television, a coalescing of technologies that should allow us to shunt around all those movies, spreadsheets, video shots, and “picture” telephone calls on one screen. “It’s a bit like talking about the convergence of the horseless carriage and the modern automobile,” says Grove. “The proper word is replacement. The computer is taking over the television.”

Case Example: Intel’s Andy Grove

Globalization and the information revolution run the world. What can we do? Adapt or die … We need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder to cope with this new world. That doesn’t mean accepting disorder, but rather, working with the disorder to introduce order.

Now-Then

The coming decade may put a collective spin on technobabble, but this lexicon is here to stay. The only development that may eventually stanch its spread is the disappearance of computers as we know them: boxes connected to screen, keyboards, and peripherals. When and if that happens – when computers become nothing more than a component of the “integrated home entertainment center” – will much of the lingo now needed to talk about and explain them be necessary any longer?

Now-Then

One could argue that some aspects of technobabble hold the potential to form a universal language of technology – a sort of “High-Tech Esperanto” that might actually succeed.

Now-Then

Technobabble’s real victim could be the industry itself, which is in danger of sliding into the same semantic swamp in which wallow lawyers, civil servants, military officers, socialogists and politicians.