Score one for ingenuity, and zero for technology.
Normally I enjoy technology at least, when it works. Then technology is a great and wonderful thing that helps one's life, or enlightens or delights one as they enjoy the latest trinket or toy on the market.
Colour me a skeptic (I'm not sure what colour that would be) but I am sometimes of the view that the more bells and whistles there are, making a given item fun or desirable, the more there is to go wrong with it.
I had a good laugh recently as I saw how one guy, a film-maker (and a buff of old movies, I would bet) used Twitter to play a royal good trick on NASA and on most anyone addicted to this form of media.
With the knowledge fairly widespread that an old satellite was going to enter the atmosphere and land on Earth in some 26 pieces (one apparently as large as a bus), this guy borrowed a page from the legendary Orson Welles and created the belief that a satellite piece was (or had) going to land on the metropolis of Okotoks, Alta., a suburb of Calgary.
Welles, of course, besides being famous for the cinematic classic, "Citizen Kane", was previously well-known for his radio drama of "War of the Worlds", in which he managed to convince people listening in that there was an actual invasion of Earth by Martians. In the latter-day case, in this day of high technology and the Internet, this guy managed to convince people that there was a satellite piece crashing in on Okotoks; the truth is, the pieces fell in the Pacific Ocean, not on land at all.
As a latter-day Luddite who disdains such media formats as Facebook, My Space and Twitter, it made my heart glad to hear how one guy could find gullibility in this day and age when people feel so confident in their technology, overly so as some people feel it's the be-all and end-all of life in the computer age.
Like many of you, I do enjoy using technology when it works well, such as the computer I write on, and my digital camera when I'm taking a photo for myself or for the newspaper, or when I'm listening to tunes on my tiny MP3 player that stores hundreds upon hundreds of songs, or when I'm watching a good movie on a DVD player on a flat-screen TV
The list could go on and on how pervasive good technology is these days, and how it enhances our lives, but I couldn't help but enjoy this story as a throw-back to the days before TV, when the radio was king (and when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, as I understand it), way, way back before my time. After all - I'm only 50; I'm not that old at all.
