09 January 2011

Brave new world with technology

In line with the radical changes, as presented by Aldous Huxley in his novel ‘Brave New World’, in fact surpassing those p jections is where technology has brought in a change in society. An ordinary citizen has access to information like never before, which make him enjoy his comforts better.

Tools of technology like the Internet and the Mobile have given him the power of choice, a true choice in the matter how he wishes to be served with pertinent information. A couple of days of technology-weaning call best explain to us the extent to which we rely on them.

With the innovations in technology leading to price reduction with increased new features it is now possible for a common man to afford access to technology and gadgets. Now comes managing the overflow of information out there and gaining the skill to filter that is relevant to one’s purpose of lifestyle. The culture of the brave new world is one that of strive for success and happiness.

And then one day it dawns to us: "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers" as told by the pioneer Steve Wozniak.

Digital Oman suggests here a few means of accessing information from the digital world on a periodic basis in a controlled manner and to manage their flow to digest it. As per the brave new world theory, harnessing technology through a means that best suits one is fostering a powerful and complete reliance of access to pertinent information.

Book marks

The most common means is to use the ‘Favorites feature’ just like book marks in a common web browser. We come across several interesting articles of interest when we try to search for something else. The best means at hand is to save the weblink as favourite and revisit regularly at the end of the day.

Google reader

An alternative tool is to use a free tool called Google reader. You can find this tool under ‘More’ options in Google window. Then one can click on ‘Add a subscription’. For example enter ‘technology’ to find feed in that discipline; then choose your feed subscriptions. Now daily alerts in the field of technology will be waiting in your Google reader for you to read at your leisure.
Yet another interesting feature of this tool is that if your friends on Google email also have a similar reader setup that is public, then you can read their favourite reads also marked from their reader lists.

News Feeds

RSS standing for Really Simple Syndication is another manner in which news as well as website updates are pushed into our subscriptions. Also called as ‘News Feeds’ enable you to get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. Most email clients have a feature to import such regular feeds into the separate ‘InBox’.

Twitter

The micro-blogging platform twitter is rich with media and corporate presence so that once you follow these ‘Usenames’, to receive small snippets of news and links appear in your timeline in under 140 characters. If this lead interests you then you can click on the link to read further.
While the above list is not exhaustive, it certainly is a good way to organise information that is found in plenty online and organise it in such a manner that you can access it anytime you are free to process the contents of the information.
Would like to hear more from you as to how you manage your digital brave new world. Do comment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice post on how technology is so empowering if used intelligently. Thanks for the bookmarks:-)