Week 4, Blog #4

One aspect of the pervasive communication environment discussed in the web lecture, Technology and Teams, struck a chord with me. As professor indicates, “a pervasive communication environment gives us the ability to access, create, and share information in multimedia from almost anywhere, at anytime, for any reason.” I agree with this. I believe these technological advances have vastly improved our society. But during emergencies or other times of crisis, some of this pervasive communication environment we all have become so reliant upon will likely be useless, and in some cases, this could be devastating. For instance, on the evening of October 30th last year, a magnitude 5.6-earthquake struck just northeast of San Jose. Thankfully, I don’t believe this tremor caused major damage or injuries, but it definitely got people’s attention. After the ‘quake, I immediately tried calling my wife who was out doing errands at the time. I got a busy signal. Why? Well, countless others were doing exactly the same thing at the same time, overloading this system we’ve all put our trust in. I was just calling to find out if she was o.k. But what if someone really needed help right away, what then? (Even at that time, I knew I shouldn’t have tried calling for this very reason (i.e., I should have left the lines open for people who really had emergencies), but I just couldn’t help making sure my wife was all right.) My point here is that even with this pseudo-emergency of an event, our society had communication problems. Not to be a downer, but I shudder to think about what communications would be like if we had a truly major emergency. I heed professor’s commentary that we need to “make technology work” for us under any circumstance, as the communication imperative suggests.