Oriental Perspective: Full speed ahead —what torpedoes?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 18, 2006 at 8:05pm
Tony Silva writes a regular “Macsimum” column looking at the Mac world from his perspective in Japan.—Dennis) Convergence. Paradigm shift. Words we’re all tired of, but it seems like I’m stepping into quite a bit of this stuff these days. It wasn’t too long ago that the news of Intel processors in Macs hit, and a bit after that that the first implications became apparent. Now, dual-boot Macs have become a reality – with Apple’s blessings, yet (Boot Camp). Beyond that, a true virtual machine environment is just ahead (Parallels). Interesting times.
Exactly how these events will change the course of our lives is anyone’s guess, but you know they will. While we squint into the fog here from the foredeck and try to make out exactly what that is ahead of us, let me say that experience tells me this is not an iceberg that we are doomed to strike. It is just as likely the solution to keeping our beer cold this summer (with apologies to my mates down under now getting ready for winter). There’s just no telling what lies ahead from the little tip of what’s visible, but we know it will be big.
It reminds me of something. That’s what happens when you get old—whenever anything happens, it always reminds you of something. This is usually accompanied by the compulsion to tell everyone about it and why it’s significant. So, here I go.
Flashback to an autumn evening in Nishinomiya, Japan, circa 1993 … on a tatami floor mat in a rickety pre-war house as drafty as most tents, an F.O.B.* English teacher hunches over a used PowerBook 180 tethered to an external Global Village modem nested in a pile of telephone cable. After an arduous bout with esoteric settings (Ah, FreePPP, mon frer e…) gleaned from 14 pages of Japanese instructions from my newly contracted ISP, there comes from the speakers of the PowerBook the oddest boinging, scratching, and gurgling one could have imagined. Damn, did I break it? No, no … there on my screen … AOL … and moments later, the front page of the day’s Chicago Tribune. Jesus may not have wept, but I sure did. There’s just no way to describe the shrinkage the world underwent in those moments; the 6,000 miles separating me from home now seemed much more like ants that the Gorgons they had been seconds before. I’m sure that old house rocked on its foundation a bit in the process. Life in Japan was now possible. I was going to make it.
Of course, few of my friends or colleagues here had more than the vaguest notion of what I meant when I talked about the internet here (we capitalized it in those days, as befitting a seeming deity). My popularity took a nosedive as my conversation topics narrowed to the wonders of the internet and badgering, as persistent as any vacuum cleaner salesman’s, them to get connected. Was I proud that Mosaic was born at the U of I? Hell, I acted as if it was something Marc Andreessen and I hammered out together over the summer.
It’s interesting to note that despite Japan’s connectedness these days, it was not at all quick to adapt to this new, what even to call it, this new “thing”. I remember an otherwise intelligent colleague telling me as late as 1998, “The internet is dead. Everyone knows it’s just America where it’s popular.” Ahem. Around the same time, I was working on an Internet English textbook for Japanese students. Incredibly, the publisher had us remove all student activities that involved computers or the web. I’m not making this up. In fact, Japan’s tardiness in getting the net to its people, and NTT’s role in that delay formed the basis for my M.A. thesis.**
For a short time I was doing a lot of technical writing and editing for Japanese electronics companies who needed help with their English language manuals. Not exciting work by any means, but it was all done over the net. I never met with the translation company people or the manufacturers. The work came as an attachment, I did the work, then sent it back with an invoice. Eventually, the yen would show up in my bank account. Oh, we had great fun going from Japanese Word documents getting edited with Wordperfect on a Mac, sure. This is old hat now, I know, but this mode of work at the time was unheard of. It was magic. When I’d explain what I was doing, people regarded me as some kind of unholy wizard of the black arts.
Of course, the internet brought with it all the goodies. Soon came amazon.com, and the ability to purchase English language books directly from overseas. Yes, the shipping was/is expensive, but buying foreign language books can be even more so. A MacWorld magazine runs about US$16, a regular paperback around US$25. (What did Steve Jobs say about power and controlling information? Or was that Mao?) Now importers had a conduit to fill the country with all kinds of good stuff from overseas. Internet shopping is a convenience if you’re living in or near a major city in your home country; to an ex-pat it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. My friends back home were now right there instead of a (then) buck-a-minute phone call away. I had the friendly and rich tech support of Mac geeks all over the world, who provided me with the information I needed to convince the school where I was teaching that, yes, Macs network very nicely, and then to enable me to show them how to get the internet to our students. Yes, those goofy modem sounds brought us wonderful things.
With broadband a few years later came Internet Radio. Maybe not a big deal to someone in Boston or San Francisco, but look at your FM dial…when I look at mine here, I see four stations. Everyone I know back home complains about the lack of quality programming, and I DO get that, but, really, have you heard any Japanese pop lately? Note to self: add link to Radio Paradise to web page. The internet changed everything about living in Japan. Everything.
Admittedly, the drama of all this is heightened considerably by having plopped oneself in a wonderland of reverse sense and sensibility across the globe from friends and family. Still, I’d argue that it has been a perfect vantage point from which to watch the way in which the web has transformed the world in the last fifteen years.
Now, back to the fog. The Windows-Mac gulf has, if not disappeared, certainly changed. The hardware barrier is gone. Folks will buy their Macs and run Mac OS X or Windows XP (or Vista
As I was writing this piece, ABC announced that its popular TV shows will be available online the day after broadcast. Last night my wife and I watched two episodes of the current season of South Park on her iMac. This morning, I Skyped an old friend in Maine – the guy to whom I handed the baton here 17 years ago when I thought was leaving Japan for good. What will cheap flash memory mean for the shape and form of our “computers”? What will they look like, and will we still even think of them as “computers” at all? One can almost make out the big battery breakthrough there on the horizon…er, no, sorry, that was just a cloud. But still.
You’re right to wonder where I’m going with all this, but the truth is, I have no idea. That’s the point. My antennae are going nuts with all that’s happening, and I can feel a universe in flux around me. It’s a kind of preja vu; an anticipation of the kind of world-changing moment that we call the internet. Web 2.0? No, bigger, bigger. When Bush was stealing the presidential election (the first time), there was no such thing as an iPod. Apple makes a mouse with more than one button, I hear. It’s Mac and Windows, media delivery, computers themselves—the one tool I have come to depend on completely and happily in my daily life – it’s all going to change. I’m not worried about it being bad, quite the opposite. I want to be alive for as much of this stuff coming as I can. I just wish the old orbs were able to see a bit more clearly into that fog ahead.
“Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
—Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man
- F.O.B. Fresh off the boat.
- Of course, since then, the gap has closed and reversed. I am continually embarrassed by what my American friends endure in the name of “broadband” back home. My 24/7 unlimited 47 Mbps connection here runs the equivalent of about US$35 per month. $20 more would get me 100 Mbps optical fiber. Those aren’t typos. What it took was the government to give NTT a good slap and loosen its hold on telecommunications; don’t count on anything similar happening in the U.S. for a while. And don’t even ask about the cell phone gap.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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