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Saturday, June 25, 2005
Roperos: ICT ‘miracles’
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
There is a disturbing revelation I came across in the news stories about the on-going 1st International Conference and Exhibition on Business and ICT here in Cebu City. It is about the fact that only “five percent of Filipinos have access to the Internet.”
This means that 95 percent of the 84 million people in this country still don’t understand what the information revolution is about, except perhaps for the use of cell phones and the miracle of text messages.
But there is a consolation there, and that is the government’s effort to bring this republic from the boondocks to the plain of electronic wonders, or perhaps, “electronic miracles.”
I have always said in this space and elsewhere that our miracle hunters need not go far to capture one. All they have to do is look at the facsimile machine.
The other day, a friend asked me to send her resume and photocopy of her passport to a friend in Dubai where she hopes to work. While sending the documents by airmail takes a couple of days and costs quite an amount, with the fax machine it took me only 10 minutes to send six pages at only the price of a long distance telephone call.
The same is true with the e-mail messages. You send a love note to the other side of the globe and, in a matter of seconds after your press the “send” button on your computer, it is there in its destination.
Many years back, I wrote my columns on a typewriter even if some of my colleagues were already using PCs. I edited my column by long hand then sent it by messenger to the office. There, the composing section retyped it.
Then I was pressured, first to use the facsimile. On a travel to the United States in 1993 during the state visit of then president Fidel Ramos, a friend in San Francisco brought to my hotel room a fax machine and an electronic typewriter. When I got used to it, I realized it was wonderful.
I lugged along through the hectic FVR schedule the typewriter and fax. But I was able to keep my deadlines for my column. When I got back from that trip—I extended my stay for three weeks in California—I was a PC revolution convert.
Really, who needs to look for the dancing sun and the crying Virgin Mary in order to believe in the miracles generated by the Divine Power and passed on through the creative genius of the human mind?
There is enough proof in the electronic gadgets now being marketed around y for us to sense the existence of a power beyond the human self.
There might be some that would snicker at this notion, and say it is a product of the scientific mind. But yes, there is no argument there.
But then, who was it who said that there are hundreds, nay, thousands of things in life and the universe that up to now science has been unable to explain and clarify?
What compose the brain that it can create, envision, or divine the electronic devices that we now enjoy using? Well, for one, did the human brain just happen to form by itself, creating the skull to protect it?
Talk of chips, how in heaven’s name was the inventor able to conceive those parts and know precisely where it should go in the body of the machine, unless, someone more knowledgeable than he was guiding his brain to think the way it did?
At this point, I cannot say anything more.
(June 25, 2005 issue)
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