I’ve just spent over a week struggling to fix an error in a new Revolution Wordpress website I’m creating, and this morning thanks to a HTML code master, Brian, the error has been corrected. It looks like the internet age has divided us into three categories, (1) those who read what’s on the internet, (2) those who create something to be read on the internet, (3) and, at the top of the pyramid, those who create the tools for the creators.
Nothing has really changed in the world since the advent of technology. There are those who use washing machines, those who sell washing machines, and those who can invent and fix washing machines. Technology creates a class of experts without which the modern world would not work.
I remember Cory Wright, a young man who grew up here in Blackstone that is now one of my code experts. While he was on the traditional educational route here, what he loved doing was learning the code of the internet. He remembers when he had his awakening. “I was looking at a friend’s new internet connection and I suddenly realized that you could create these web sites. It was like a light going off.” There was the power, he instinctively knew. Image when the first books were written and some young man, the first to see one of these books in his village perhaps, realized that learning to read was where the power lay. And it was just one jump further to say, “I want to be able to write books, not just read them.”
And so our modern digital culture depends on and is driven by those who hold the power to create the tools we work with, tools that are now our tractors and trains. So my advice to young men and women is, “Learn the language of our technology and you will go very far indeed. Eveyone will need you.” I certainly do. Thank you, Brian and Debra.
Posted under current events
This post was written by ed on February 19, 2009
