It’s easy to get caught up in the glitter and froth surrounding the high-octane, high-tech wonders that emanate from
The valley has been cranking it out for years —
semiconductors, lasers, GPS, mobile phones, apps, search engines,
wireless, social networking. It is, after all, pretty cool stuff.
But sometimes it takes something horrible to really underscore just how wonderful it all is.
I’ve been thinking about that when I think about
Sure, the Web, social networking sites, our beloved
mobile phones and laptops all lend themselves to wasteful and vapid
uses. But then comes
The pictures and stories from the
country just don’t stop. Indescribable misery followed by indescribable
misery. The injured waiting in pain. Children starving. Parents dying.
But there have been other
donation could make a difference, and who now have an answer: Text
“Haiti” to 90999. Enough people have done so to raise well over
It’s one thing to be able to close a deal or vote
for the next American Idol with your cell phone; it’s quite another to
send desperately needed help to a country on the brink.
The
the word about texting. And many of us turned to Facebook to find out
how we could help. We gathered on the Global Disaster Relief page to
commiserate and to find links to
Catholic Relief Services and others. We sent money to support those who
have the expertise to do some needed good amid the unfathomable bad.
The real heroes, of course, are on the ground —
rescue and relief workers and Haitians who pulled their neighbors from
the rubble and are now caring for them in untenable conditions. But
even real heroes can use some help.
Inveneo, a
working to build a long-distance wireless network so nearly three dozen
nongovernmental relief agencies can make phone calls and exchange
digital data with each other and their offices worldwide. (I’ll think
about that next time I’m tempted to say that I simply couldn’t live
without wireless.)
“There are a lot of guys like me who are helping
out,” says Marsh, whose belief in technology’s power for good goes back
at least to when he was a founding member of the
It’s somehow appropriate that
At its best this is a place built on the concept of collaboration: many
coming together from different directions to solve a common problem. In
this case, the problem isn’t how to build the must-have eReader or
iSlate, but how to save the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Technologists by their nature are optimists — believers who maintain
that the thorniest problems can be solved with deep thought and hard
work.
Maybe that goes without saying. Or maybe it’s good,
especially when times are bad, to remind ourselves of what we have and
what we can do with it.
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