I am still processing what I want to say about Steve Jobs, who passed away far too young and far too soon. I might as well out myself as a long-term Apple fan, and do feel free to tease me about it. As it happens, I wanted this week's article to be topical about the internets and stuff because I'm in the middle- literally, the middle- of a course on social media for social change. Topical, yeah. But I had to shoe-horn Steve in because I ran out of wordcount making the case for a computer in every home. It might be ambitious and unrealistic, but so was universal suffrage at one point in time. Coming soon to an East African near you:
"And now we live in a post-Jobsian world. Computers as they work these days collapse the walls between work and play, and increasingly through social media they are bridging the gap between the personal and the public. With the internet becoming increasingly accessible, physical distance is becoming negligible. Information in the blink of an eye, saving the time that it used to take to go to a library or a bookshop or an expert. The planet has witnessed the emergence of the communal human superbrain, and it lives online."I hoped that the term "post-Jobsian world" might be my neologism, but Google tells me otherwise. I suppose it was too obvious a term not to be coined. Anyways, the point of the article is that projections of a Tanzanian future seem a bit short-term and conservative to me, recycling through the same problems that face us now. Have we run out of imagination, or are we afraid to dare? Have we lost our mojo? I hope not. While we build schools and roads and lay down water pipes, we should be dreaming very big dreams about things like eco-friendly public transport systems in urban centers, and e-learning, and boosting our intellectual productivity...
