Wilfredo Vallín Almeida
I was flipping through a magazine. It’s called Current PC. It has caused me some anxiety about a reality I am just discovering: although the magazine is in Spanish, my native tongue, I can barely understand what it says; I don’t know the meaning of countless technological terms.
The person who gave me the magazine to browse receives it regularly at home. He’s not a computer specialist, but someone who wants to keep abreast of new developments in technology in a form that is accessible and understandable for him.
Some of the arrticles are:
– 10 Super Plug-ins for Google Chrome
– Mastering Evernote Completely
– Move from Windows 7 to New Windows 8
– Mega, 50 gigabytes of memory for free
– Obsessed with online security.
– How to leave Instangram.
– Redecorate your home with Home Designer.
Reading (or rather trying to read) the articles, I can’t avoid a troubling question: Where are we Cubans in relation to all this? As technological development advances at breakneck speed, how long will we Cubans be denied the right to have the internet at home?
To try to explain myseslf with an example, I quote the following small fragment of the article “When the Internet is Everywhere” from this magazine:
The future has a poetic name, the Internet of Things … Health is one of the sectors that can benefit from the Internet of Things. The right technology will make many doctor visits unnecessary. And doctors can know — in real time and from a distance, thanks to sensors that their patients carry — blood sugar, blood pressure or heart rate itself …
The article continues with a description that seems to me more science fiction than science fact and current technology.
And in the face of all this, where does that leave us?
3 September 2013
