Adam Kenner's Solutions Page


"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

Introduction
Do not despair. There are many problems with the explosion of technology in society, but we have been here before with other cultural and societal revolutions and we have weathered them, though not without pain. There are steps that every individual can take that will help ensure that technology fulfills its true purpose and potential: to serve as a tool that ensures privacy, increases productivity, assists in improving the public health, facilitates appropriate storage and retrieval of information and brings the peoples of the world together through communication channels owned and controlled by the peoples themselves.

Examples
Privacy: Support secure electronic communications. Do not divulge information about yourself that you do not want made publicly available or sold by others for a profit.

Productivity: Insist on careful institutional technology planning and deployment based on defined needs and workable solutions. This approach will begin to mitigate the effects of "overtechnologizing." Don't buy things for home that you don't really need. Learn as much as you can about a product before buying it.

Health: If you do a lot of keyboard work (yes, pianos count too, although musicians are taught the correct way to hold their hands and wrists), use ergonomically designed furniture and equipment with adequate work surface lighting. Take a five minute break from the keyboard every half-hour and do another task. Exercise for a half-hour each day instead of netsurfing or watching television. Watch Seinfeld reruns instead of the nightly news. Read books.

General: Campaign to have commercial sponsorship removed entirely from all television news, but require all broadcast and cable networks to allocate funding to commercial-free news programming. It is impossible for network or cable corporations to provide unbiased and thorough news reporting when the purpose of a newscast is to keep people from changing the channel so that the next commercial will reach them.

Conclusion: Take a look around. There's a lot you can do to change these problems. They're not as bad as you may have thought.

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Adam Kenner / 5 November 1996
kenner@cloud9.net