Many people have had this experi-ence: you're in the car on a long trip when you start feeling famished. All you want to do is head somewhere close, grab some lunch, and then keep going. But you're in unfamiliar territory with no information about the place, so you chicken out. If you had a cellphone that could go online, were in a wireless Internet "hot-spot," and a guide to local restaurants was online, all your questions would have been answered and you could have taken that break.
At the 2000 World Congress in Information Technology, in Taipei, then-Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina predicted that the new information age would be one "where people can connect anytime, anywhere to useful e-services of all kinds.... Where useful e-services are running on always-on infrastructure and are delivered to information appliances that are pervasive, that are personal, that are simple." That year, Taipei played host to a huge number of IT gurus, all of whom cherished this dream of an internet-worked world. But many said we were "only 3% of the way there."
Flash forward five years. That technology is closer than ever to being reality, and we should all be proud, for Taiwan is leading the way.
Last year, the government declared it would make the M-Taiwan (Mobile Taiwan) project a primary infrastructural focus. Within five years, at a cost of NT$37 billion, a hardware infrastructure and application services layer would be rolled out. Many central and local government agencies had already unveiled similar plans for networking their areas, laying a solid foundation for the current "mobilization" of Taiwan.
If M-Taiwan is successful, people will be able to free themselves from office network cables and modems and get online whenever, wherever they want. This wireless future will offer all kinds of functionality--with a single cellphone you'll be able to look up information online, check e-mail, videoconference, play MP3s, watch live sports, or record video to show your friends, no matter where you are--from up in the mountains to down at the beach. Cool, isn't it!
Naturally there are still some problems. If you went online using a cellphone and stared at that tiny little screen for three hours to watch a sporting event, that would play havoc with your eyes. It could also run down the battery and disconnect you. If you were using a laptop, you'd have to cart it with you everywhere. If hot-spot coverage wasn't comprehensive, you could be watching a critical moment in a soccer game when you suddenly stepped out of wireless range, and who wouldn't get annoyed at that?
But despite the problems, to many people "information" is almost an addiction. Aside from commuting and taking breaks to eat, they are used to being online virtually from the moment they wake up to the moment they turn in. So you can imagine that after tasting the joy of being able to look up whatever takes their fancy whenever they want, a lot of these folk latch onto the idea regardless of cost.
Sinorama's cover feature this month focuses on the M-Taiwan project, with senior writer Vito Lee and photojournalist Chuang Kung-ju probing every corner of this project for a "mobile" Taiwan. Perhaps it's because not enough people can access these wireless services, or the hot areas aren't big enough, or the applications offered aren't yet good enough, but so far this mobile era is little more than a sketch. But it still offers the hope of a wireless future.
For another aspect of this hope, look at this month's special feature commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Today we need to comb through the works of scholars working from various positions, or try and make use of the hazy, unreliable memories of the old folk who were there. If, in the future, we could record, inspect, copy, and transmit information from the scene, everything would be laid out in plain sight. Perhaps such technology can greatly reduce the amount of suspicion, distrust, rumor mongering, and misunderstandings between different sides in times to come. Is it possible that this mobile era could not only free one physically, but also mentally, and even spiritually?
