My abstract acceptance e-mail from the technical committee for the meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Salt Lake City, Utah, last fall was blunt: “Slide presentations using 35-mm projectors are no longer available at GSA” — only digital media presentations and a centralized computer system were available.
| The battle between keeping up and escaping will be constant. |
Because I dislike and am uneasy with PowerPoint, I immediately sent an e-mail
to the company contracted to handle the presentation technology for the meeting,
to see what my other options might be. I decided to rent an overhead projector
from them for $45 an hour. An uneasy week spent making transparencies and imagining
myself stumbling around in front of a sleeping audience at 8:05 a.m. in a darkened
room at the convention center, however, gave me second thoughts. I had to join
the 21st century.
Sure enough, while PowerPoint has its flaws (see the February
2004 Geotimes Geologic Column, “The Pitfalls of PowerFluff”),
the oral presentations at the 2005 GSA meeting (the first without any conventional
slides) were technically almost flawless. Poster sessions featuring elaborate
artistic masterpieces generated by the latest super-printers were far superior
to their scotch-taped, brightly colored posterboard predecessors.
My change of heart led me to examine larger implications of the technological
revolution. E-mails back and forth with Nancy Carlson, the technical program
manager for GSA, answered some questions. She explained to me that while progress
costs (rental fees for LCD projectors, for example, are steep), the new technology
and accompanying procedures significantly streamlined the process by which the
meeting organizers assembled an abstracts volume. The number of employees involved
in the weeks before annual and sectional meetings has been reduced from roughly
eight to one. In past years, GSA brought 40-plus reviewers to its national headquarters
in Boulder to put the national technical program together. Now it’s all
done online.
The last-minute session at the Salt Lake City meeting, “An Eye on Katrina:
Geoscience Perspectives on a Catastrophic Hurricane,” probably couldn’t
have been put together without the electronic revolution. The talks themselves
demonstrated the benefits of technology. Downloaded satellite images showed
the shocking extent of damage and coastline alteration. One paper by Margaret
McMillan described GISCorps, an organization of professionals skilled in GIS
(geographic information systems) and global positioning system (GPS) techniques
who were voluntarily deployed along the Gulf Coast to speedily “facilitate
map production, data management, and other critical spatially-related functions”
in support of the belated recovery effort. Imagine what location tracking —
radio-tagged personal identity labels linked to GPS — could do for finding
lost field geologists, Alzheimer’s patients or even philandering Parisians.
Also in full view at the recent conference were cell phones, which some people
describe as the cigarettes of our decade — an addiction, a symbol of our
fanaticism for connectedness. Some went off during technical sessions, and some
attendees hugged their phones tighter than I embrace my wife! Sadly, people
stood in longer lines for e-mail and Internet access than for chili and cappuccino
before lunchtime “Hot Topics” sessions. Despite these seemingly annoying
cultural shifts, however, consider the potential that cell phones and the Internet
have to save countless lives in disasters such as the Sumatran tsunami or Hurricane
Katrina.
Technology is also impacting publishing dramatically. I remember my frustration
as an associate editor for Geology and the Journal of Sedimentary
Research, wasting hours tracking down reviewers by telephone. Now, e-mails
trigger immediate responses. Manuscripts and reviewers’ critiques that
once shuffled slowly back and forth by FedEx and UPS from reviewer to associate
editor to editor, with glacial turn-around times, now travel (like this Geologic
Column did) through Cyberspace.
Likewise, smart electronic classrooms permit images, graphics, animations and
bullet points to be more effectively presented. Progress has been made in engaging
students in large, lecture-type courses with classroom performance system (CPS)
“clickers.” Academic institutions like Duke, Purdue and Drexel universities
have pioneered “podcasts,” audio recordings of classroom lectures
available online and updated continually.
Amazon and Google are perfecting systems that allow online access (purchased
at roughly 5 cents per page) to any page of any book or journal. The Google
Search Library Project (formerly known as Google Print), which is seeing its
fair share of copyright controversy, is essentially a single gigantic electronic
library card.
This revolution will stop for no one. But there are downsides.
Balancing savings in time, personnel and logistics with the cost of software
and hardware is critical. The federal government is requiring universities (some
of which are protesting) to overhaul their Internet computer networks to facilitate
monitoring of e-mail and all online communications, at a cost of $7 billion.
Some argue that wireless classrooms do more for in-class text messaging and
Web surfing than for learning.
The battle between keeping up and escaping will be constant. Instantaneous connectability
through Web surfing, online shopping and research, e-mail and cell phones is
wonderful, but what happens to weekends, holidays and simple reflection? A plugged-in
generation constantly wired to iPods, BlackBerries and cell phones may become
too tightly tethered intellectually. I’m not surprised that recent recipients
of MacArthur Fellowships (so-called genius grants) spend lots of time “unplugged,”
as was reported in The New York Times on Sept. 27.
As we continue to trade time and freedom for instantaneous connectability, do
not become so plugged in that you lose touch with yourself and your life. The
most important component of any technological tool is its on-off switch.
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