Holy Connection

So, we’re living in the age of internet and inter- everything. We’re now connected all the time and everywhere. Houses have computers installed and you can control the lights and the blinds from an app on your phone. You can throw off the thieves while vacationing in Thailand, making them think someone is home. Especially in Europe, where the cities are more technologically advanced than in places such as the United States. That might be true in countries such as Finland, England, or France. Scratch Spain off the list. However much the government might brag about our preparedness, and our 3.0 society (or whatever’s fastest), we’re sadly far behind. And falling further behind every day.

In rural areas 4G technology is slowly being implanted, slowly, as in slowly grows the grass in December. In cities it’s much more common to find free open wi-fi connections in cafés and bars. Some shopping areas are also equipped with it, such as the newest shopping mall in Santiago. The large hospital also has open wi-fi in the admissions area. Someone who has to stay with a family member and has to connect for work reasons or otherwise, can do so without having to have his own, portable wi-fi stick. But that’s in the big hospital. There aren’t enough beds there to attend to all the patients who need hospitalization, so some of them are taken to another, smaller public hospital that used to belong to the provincial government. That hospital has lately had a facelift with new windows, new façade covering the old one, and new beds installed. But technologically speaking, the only connection it has is the intranet used by the health system. The floor nurses can have your medical history at the touch of a button, but if someone needs their computer to connect to their job for any reason, they have to bring their own wi-fi or leave. So much for bragging about being connected all the time, everywhere.

It’s a little sobering to think that just ten years ago being connected to the internet meant having a land line to have a good connection. It’s even more sobering to think that twenty years ago none of this was necessary for the average person. People lived just as well going to a cyber café to connect to that new thing called internet. It was something that was not absolutely necessary. People still sent snail-mail and called on the phone. Cell phones were also something new and not thought of as a necessity. People would go to a library and look up in books information they needed to know. Newspapers were still papers, and to look up a story in the archives, you had to hunt for the microfiche and run it through the machine, hoping to catch the article the first time without having to roll it back. Some were probably starting to digitalize their archives then, but because they were looking more to the future than their present needs.

What technology will the future bring? Will it be worth it? And when would it take the liberty of reaching the small villages?