Bonjour Laziness by Corinne Maier

Author:Corinne Maier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425072
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

New Information and Communications Technologies Are the Wave of the Future

Computers are the wave of the future. People were already saying this in the 1970s. The latest information and communications technologies are the offspring of computers and the Internet. For twenty years now, corporations have been investing hand over fist in these technologies, hoping for phenomenal gains in productivity: computers are everywhere; the Internet will change the world, create jobs, usher in a period of intense growth. All problems will be solved with the Internet; it will revolutionize human history. With this marvelous communication tool, problems of frontier, race, and religion will disappear. The Internet will open up the backwaters, reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots in society, encourage north-south exchanges, educate the illiterate, teach children, and liberate the housewife. We shall all be brothers and sisters, there will be no more war, all together now . . .

The song sounds sweet, but the reality is more brutal. For the time being, the only undeniable effect of the white tornado of the computer sciences has been the massive elimination of secretarial jobs, which were in fact quite useful. Anything else? No, but these new technologies have definitely increased the productivity of none other than the computer and telecommunications sector, according to Robert M. Solow, Nobel Prize recipient in economics. That’s rich.

But the new information and communications technologies, without having given proof positive of their usefulness, have at least created something concrete: a language, and that’s not nothing. It’s an abstruse language, for the geeks and nerds speak a jargon understood only by initiates: discussions of different development platforms or the choice of the most appropriate software solution, all of it studded with gems like “html,” “xml,” “Dreamweaver,” and “Cold-Fusion.” Here’s one example, sent to me by a friend who does understand what it all means:

The merging of WSFL and Xlang is just as important as the two new protocols. The main interest of Web services, as much inside as outside the firewall, resides in the rapid development of the XML ad hoc applications. BPEL4WS will offer a more standardized method to achieve the same goal, simply by fusing two already known languages. But it seems that the development initiatives overlooked various operational front-end B2B processing protocols, notably the ebXML protocol, the BPML [business process modeling] language and the wholly new WSCI [Web services choreography interface].

I imagine some readers will have fallen asleep in their chairs. What does it all mean? When you read such a sentence, you feel stupid. That’s probably what it’s there for: to make us recognize our inferiority. It’s all incomprehensible, and it’s incomprehensible that it should be incomprehensible to us, since we do know how to use the Internet! After all, we spend hours of office time trying to find important information on the average water temperature at a Caribbean resort, or on fly-fishing in Montana.

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