Shadow Karma

Some time ago I attended a theme day of leadership organized by the Adult Education Centre of Tampere. The content of the four presentations varied a lot and two of them didn’t even mention leadership but some of them were quite interesting anyway. Jari Metsämuuronen from the Finnish Board of Education talked about the future and how he thinks things might go, which was extremely interesting and reminded me of the discussions we often used to have in Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Education Technology Centre eEDU.

One of the points Metsämuuronen made was that the world has changed a lot on the past 20 years and because the speed of change seems to be excelerating all the time, it’s really impossible to see in advance what kind of changes the future will bring. However he presented some scenarios, which might be possible. He didn’t say any of the scenarios would rule out any of the other ones and most of his speech was quite difficult to grasp, even though it was extremely interesting.

When talking about how the world has changes, one has to look some 20 years into the past. In 1990 our family didn’t have a computer, we weren’t using emails or anything like that. The first computer to our household (with Windows 3.1) was bought around 1994. My father had a mobile phone and he had had one ever since the 80′s because he has a sail boat and it’s important to have a way to contact people if you’re having trouble. The mobile phone was the size of a suitcase (or a briefcase, perhaps) and it was quite difficult to use, if I recall correctly. At least it wasn’t very portable so it wasn’t that “mobile”. My mother got her first mobile phone around 1995 and I got my first mobile phone in 1999. At that time the text messages were all written in CAPITAL LETTERS, which nowadays would be considered yelling.

So, about 11 years ago I started using mobile phones and haven’t stopped since. The first mobile phone I had was such that one could call and send (and receive, of couse) text messages but there were no colours or anything else on the screen. I think it wasn’t until 2005 when I bought my first mobile phone with colours but even that phone couldn’t access the Internet and I thought I wouldn’t need it anyway. The first phone with a camera in it I bought was around 2007 and I don’t think I ever used the pictures I took for anything else than perhaps a background image on the phone. The picture quality was bad and I had no way of moving the pictures from the phone to my computer.

Now my phone has a full qwerty-keyboad, proper internet access and a relatively good camera. I use my phone for several things in addition to calling and texting. A few days ago I had to take my phone to be repaired and since then I’ve used my old phone, previous to the latest one. In just a few days I’ve learned to hate the old keyboard and I never use the internet connection because it’s too difficult and too slow. I started using my new phone in February so the way I use a mobile phone has changed in about six months.

What this leaves us with is: the world is changing and keeping up with the change can be breath-taking. Unfortunately for some and fortunately for others the change is here and the only way to cope in this world is to keep up with the change.