I remember the first time I became interested in blogging, it was after watching the movie Julie and Julia in 2009 which was about a young lady called Julia Powell who aspired to make all renowned chef Julia Child’s 524 recipes in 365 days. She did this from her tiny apartment in New York and blogged about it on a daily basis, which later led to so many hits a movie was made about it. Now why did I bring this up? A couple of young professionals of whom I am one had an argument a few days ago about the level of technological development and awareness in my country Nigeria and I was of the opinion that we were still quite technologically illiterate and to back up my argument I brought up the example of our exposure to web 2.0 and the story of Julie and Julia and how blogging was quite alien to most of our country’s population. Now just to be clear, people did know about blogging, podcasts etc. but very few especially when you look at a country with a population of over 120 million people. I did win the argument but it was one of those arguments you really wish you lost, because it would be so much better to have been wrong.
Now this brings us to the subject and begs the question, would we ever catch up to the technology of our generation? What needs to be done? Why is this so important?
So would we ever catch up? In my opinion if we continue with the current mode of operations, doing the same thing over and over, then there is really no hope of catching up with other world economies in all aspects including new technology and all its advantages.
What needs to be done? Create awareness and make technology available at all levels of education and government parastatals. Right now you find up to date technology in mostly expensive private schools and the standard public school student only knows how to check his/her email at public internet cafes and might not even have personal PC’s. There are some government parastatals where there are very few computers and/or computer literate individuals, this needs to be changed and more people need to get this training.
Why is this important? To say this is important is an understatement. In my opinion technology especially the internet/web 2.0 is the future. Everything now seems to be in virtual environment even jobs. People can work from their homes and earn a living. Products and services are marketed on the internet and deals are also made and executed online. Traditional letter writing practically extinct and almost all forms of communication is via the internet. Every day there are new improved technology being developed and rolled out and developed and some developing countries do keep up, if we do not try to close the gap immediately, it’ll keep growing and we would be left playing catch up for a long time to come. Albert Einstein did define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Available from:http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins133991.html assessed 25 August 2011).
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