The knowledge society or, what do I do when my PC crashes?

A lot is said about the so-called ‘knowledge society’. The scary thing about it is that people participating in it (whether they realise it or not) automatically become knowledge workers. Another cliché, ‘closing the gaps’, enjoyed a brief life a decade back and could well do with a resurrection here as nowhere are there gaps as gaping as knowledge gaps.

People who hope to make a living using databases, Internet connections and electronic publishing need to learn how to control the tools that earn them a living. I suspect most of these workers asked to configure their own connection to the office network would experience difficulty.

Spam Spam Spam

Anyone listening to Monty Python singing “Spam, Spam, Spam” forty years ago wouldn’t have realised that the name for this processed meat would take on a new meaning. It arrives in most e-mail in-boxes hourly. Spam is the bane of people who need e-mail to stay in touch.

Nuisance and scam e-mails are generally called Spam although they are also described as phishing, chain letters and Nigerian scams, depending on how they’re designed to extract money from the recipient. Fighting Spam is a tedious task but necessary to return e-mail to being a useful tool.

Password posers

When I was a kid we left the house key under our back door mat. In 20 years of the practice, no one ever burgled the family home.

These days, the equivalent of a naïve trust in a doormat to keep things secure has gone electronic. People will dead-bolt their doors but still leave passwords to their Internet activities flapping on the air-conditioning breeze on yellow post-it notes or they use their first name or (yes, this really happens), “password” as the entry to their on-line possessions.

Passwords are a pest but try living without them. Back in the eighties, when EFTPOS arrived, it’s likely you had only one to remember and that was only 4 numbers. These days, many people have a dozen or more that matter and others that get used once and discarded.