Too Fast for Too Many by teresa@voxroxmedia.com - HTML preview

Concluding but not Conceding

On the morning of August 31, 1859, the sun ejected a giant burst of charged particles. They hit the earth 18 hours later, creating auroras so bright that at 1 AM birds sang and people thought morning had dawned. Currents induced in telegraph wires prevented transmission, and sparks from the wires set papers aflame.

Randolph Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry at the UM Medical School explains that solar ejections this intense occur about every 500 years. If we were to experience a similar event now it would cause extensive social and economic disruptions. Power outages would last for months and there would be no GPS navigation, cell phone communication, or air travel.

And while I am fairly concerned about the devastating effects a potential geomagnetic storm would have on all of us today, I am far less concerned about a once of occurrence of this nature than about the acceleration of complexity levels I've discussed above.

In the face of these convoluted technological webs, many people find themselves trapped in even more fragile and very vulnerable situations. My experience as a copywriter and content writer tells me you don't have to go to the slums of India or Brazil to find people struggling with the pace of technology. Small business owners in Los Angeles, Nashville or the Australian outback are struggling to make themselves heard in the net just because they don't speak the Internet language. And when they think they've learnt it, a new "dialect" supplants the original and they are at a loss all over again.

There are approximately 125 million companies in the world of which 99% are SMEs.

In the US, the number exceeds 27+.

In India, SMEs are said to be the backbone of the Indian economy, employing close to 40% of India's workforce and contributing 45% to India's manufacturing output. And yet, they contribute only 17% to the country's GOP. Oue to their low scale and poor adoption of technology, Indian SMEs have very poor productivity. Too many firms stay small, unregistered and un-incorporated in the unorganised sector so that they can avoid taxes and regulations. The firms have little incentive to invest in upgrading skills of largely temporary workers or in investing in capital equipment," reports the Economic Times.

Indian SMEs are not alone.

But we have already talked about it.

Now it's time to roll up our sleeves and start making sure that technological complexity doesn't get out of too many hands because as Aimee Mullins wisely said to her TEO audiences,

"Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well."

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