WANDA SLOAN
I remember the exact moment. I was dancing to Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, wondering if anything could ever be more thrilling than Bob Seger getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, when I walked over to the ringing phone and got the news.
My daily newspaper had a baby.
Looking back, it was the obvious thing to do. But no one charts the first 20 years of a loser, either. Let's just cut to the chase and say that a lot of short-vision, uncomprehending people were wrong and Post Database was right.
Truth be told, it has been quite a ride from our parking garage office of 1987 to the Bangkok-skyline corner suites of 2007. The year that this newspaper was born, most 20-year-olds had never lived in a home without a TV set. People walked across the room to answer their telephones, and stood or sat there for the entire conversation. If you went out, you didn't get the call.
People got their news via a delivery man each morning, and TV stations had a newscast at 8 pm. Twenty years ago, young Anthony Waltham danced to Walk Like An Egyptian and went "Wow" to Whitesnake's Here I Go Again, available on 12-inch wax albums and, for only a little more, on cassettes - after exhausting days and evenings spent designing and arranging Thailand's first, best weekly technology newspaper, that is.
Today's 20-year-old offspring of Post Database readers cannot remember living in a house without a computer. They reach into their purses or pockets to answer the phone whenever and wherever they are, and only miss a call if they look at the caller-ID and don't want to talk to him.
People get their news via a delivery man each morning and via the newspaper's web site and through unscheduled bulletin newscasts and via satellite-delivered pay-TV stations and via email. They get songs instead of albums, from stores or via the Internet, and burn their own compilations on binary disks known as CDs.
In 20 years, Post Database has been privileged and astounded but never without words to cover the fastest revolution in the history of humans. There is no longer any choice about it. There is no digital "lifestyle" which is a choice. We have chronicled the change to a digital life, planet-wide.
In three weeks, my personal child labourer will trek to the amphur office to get her first ID card; it will be a smart one. Her photograph by a digital camera will be stored on a computer hard drive. She will fill in an analogue form with an analogue ballpoint - but a clerk will immediately transform the information to ones and zeroes. The card will emerge from a USB printing port a few minutes later.
Twenty years ago, ATMs were against the law, classified as slot machines, and an entrepreneur was shipping day-late CNN broadcasts to Thailand for sale on VHS tape. A tiny handful of nerds was experimenting with a new device called a modem that could send computer stuff to another person over the phone as fast as a crack secretary could type. A Chulalongkorn University professor showed up at a meeting of hobby computerists to announce he had succeeded in connecting to the Internet.
Argument over whether the cellphone or PCs or tiny computers in cars or pay-TV has done the most to create the digital age seems pointless. Hundreds of large and small changes have created the digital age as surely as they created the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past.
I find it astounding, no, breath-taking really, how much has changed in a single generation. Some profess to be confused, confounded and conflicted by the past 20 years, but I am constantly amazed by how smoothly we have adapted.
In 20 years a lot of clocks have lost their hands, but humankind seems to have retained its collective head. We still have friends from the community and workplace, but we also have them around the world; everybody is a pen pal now. Citizens and authorities have to deal with new types of crimes, but the percentage of criminals among us is about the same.
Is life "better" than it was 20 years ago? It's hard to say, because the answers are personal as well as objective. People as a whole already live longer than they did 20 years ago. Many fatal diseases of 1987 no longer exist, and the death toll from almost every single chronic disease has been reduced. Far from putting people out of work, the digital age has produced more jobs than at any time in world history. It will produce still more today.
Food is more healthy, transportation is safer, communications are faster, salaries are higher, accommodation is more comfortable - all because of the digital age and the efficiency it has brought - or wrought if you prefer.
Happiness is another matter. Most people work more, even in the millions of new jobs that the digital age has produced. Stress is up, pressure to produce has increased from every boss, as the Post Database workers can attest. You can meet Prince Charming on the other side of the world, and you can marry him online. But you still have to work to eat.
Some people have adapted well to the digital revolution, and it should be unsurprising that youngsters fare the best, as a group. They are unaware there didn't used to be a digital age.
A survey last week in Singapore found that nine of 10 children from 10 to 14 use their computers and the Internet to communicate, to learn and to play. I only mention it because it is the latest survey. The same result is found from Thailand to Toronto to Timbuktu.
And there are those who can't cope.
The laughing police didn't give the name of the 46-year-old German who just followed orders in Bremen. He had a satellite navigation system in his Audi. When the smooth-talking satnav said "Turn left," he did it immediately. He drove over the kerb and onto the railway tracks where, to his utter amazement, he became stuck and could go no further.
Almost all the rest of us have been more successful. Post Database has been honoured to document the successes and missteps of the past 20 years, and we are thrilled at the idea we'll do it for the next 20 as well.
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