So much for the post-literate society. Vast sums of content shunted around at the speed of money, media channels around every turn, a torrent of books and periodicals, the Web, the swelling inbox. How does anybody get anything done when there s so much to read. For those of us who use the computer all day and for all sorts of tasks, the computer becomes a simple and comfortable way to accomplish many goals, because we spend a lot of time focussing on computers. Most people don't use computers in the kind of intensive, global way that those who develop software and Web sites do.
Many people see and use computers as a big, fancy typewriter.
Using the computer is your goal, and the tasks and strategies are formulated to allow that to happen. The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They've been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call 'future shock'.