There’s a Lot of It About

curmudgeon

Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author

“Alot of what, and about where?” I hear you cry. One question at a time, I reply. First, there’s too much of everything these days, and, second, it’s happening all over. Furthermore, everybody’s doing it. As a contemporary Wordsworth might say: “The Web is too much with us, late and soon, getting and browsing we lay waste our powers.” There is a glut of unfiltered information proving more dangerous than Alexander Pope’s “A Little Learning” where “shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.” Pope surely predicts our age of instant, effortless data access when he writes:

 

“But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New distant scenes of endless science rise!”

 

We also have our latter-day Wordsworth, the contrarian’s contrarian Andrew Keen (quod googlet). His The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday, 2007) is provocatively subtitled “How today’s Internet is killing our culture.” Keen bemoans Web 2.0 as the digital dystopia, regretting that the technology he promoted in the early Internet gold rush has become Frankenstein’s monster. Amateur (in the derogatory sense) content is murdering the traditional media. On the wider cultural front, it spawns instant celebrity cults, not excluding Keen’s own dizzying exposure on the Web! Fads and faddisms come and go thick and fast; fashions, thin and thinner, in a snowclone of clichés. In C++ terms: ¹

 

white = new black;
purple = new white;
hiphop = new rock_and_roll;
small = new big;
subprime = new affordable;
michigan = new florida;
C# = new C++;

 

Thus, wisdom-free information is not just here-and-there and now-and-then but all-over, all-the-time. Bad news still predominates the digital headlines as it did in the old media, but now any amateur with Photoshop or i Web can create 9/11 conspiracies for millions of You Tube

And everybody’s

DOING IT.

and Brasscheck viewers. What used to be the occasional endemic scare is now a continuous pandemic panic. Local is dead.

Global rules. Private angsts are no longer confined to Freudian couches but relayed live (stretching the meaning of live) via a million blogs. Each counseling group and realtime disaster has its own dedicated e-magazine and TV channel. National Geographic is the daily Tsunami Times. Discovery runs an hourly bird-flu alert digest. What was once the History Channel is now subdivided into the Hitler, Stalin, and Bush channels. Press the red button for Darfur.

Hackers’ moans accumulate on http://thedailywtf.com. (I refuse to explain what wtf means here, except to say that it is unrelated to the World Taekwondo Federation.) Will ACM soon have a Journal of Insoluble Problems and Persistent Bugs with articles such as “Why Your Projects Will Always be Late and Over Budget”? In spite of which, of course, we will continue to worry about the inevitable.

I can, perhaps, offer some good news, or at least a hint on solving the late-project problem. It concerns the world’s largest IT project, the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) $25 billion plan to digitize and centralize all patient records. The word patient is jarringly ironic, per- haps, in view of the six troubled years (missed deadlines, budget rescaling, managerial and staff changes) endured since 2002 when the NHS NPfIT (National Programme for IT) was launched. (The fIT part of the acronym has also invited some titters.)

As Rod Thomas has observed (London Times, April 28, 2008), the NHS has neatly solved its schedule-slippage problems by “renaming its IT strategies once they fail to deliver their objectives against target time scales.” Thus, the original 1992 strategy was called “Getting Better with Information and Technology,” followed by the 1998 strategy named “Information for Health,” subsequently morphing into NPfIT in 2002. The NHS has just appointed two new chief information managers, and Thomas is predicting yet another “rename” to reset the project clock