24 January 2005 Blog Home : January 2005 : Permalink
When Robin Knox-Johnston became the first person to sail round the world non-stop, in 1969, he had none of the high-tech electronic navigational systems or the space-age materials now available.
“My boat was small and wooden,” he said. “MacArthur’s boat is three times as long, half as heavy and has sails three or four times larger. My radio packed up after 2½ months, so for eight months of the voyage I didn’t have contact with anyone.
“I did wonder at times whether I was going mad without knowing it.”
IN ANY sailing race, weather inevitably plays its part and the next few days could be crucial for MacArthur. Satellite communications and the internet mean that she is supplied with constant detailed forecasts and advice on which course to take.
Late last week her team were predicting that the wind would weaken this weekend, threatening to reduce her speed just as she needed to break through to the comfort of the trade winds. They were advising her to try to cross the equator as far to the east as she could.
It is this sort of progress, stuff that we now take for granted which was obscure five or ten years ago, which makes all the difference. Undoubtedly MacArthur is a sailing genius, but undoubtedly she would do far less well without all modern technology.
In a similar vein is an article on War Photograhpy. This takes as its starting point the recent UK court marshals relating the the British maltreatment equivalent to Abu Ghraib, but it goes much much further. Part is pointing out that censorship of battlefield (or other similar) images is now a lost battle as cameras become ever smaller:
THE scandal over the photographs focuses attention on whether soldiers have any business taking cameras with them into war. But can they be stopped nowadays? In the 1914-18 war, the initial instinct of Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, was to ban any kind of photography at the front, including official film. ...
In the second world war there was still censorship, with the military using war photographers to promote the virtues of the fighting man. This was made easier by the fact that cameras were too cumbersome for soldiers to carry into combat.
...By then, in the late 1960s, cameras were compact and lightweight. The result was millions of images taken both by real war photographers and by combatants.
...The rapid advance in camera technology in the past few years, which turns even a mobile phone into a miniature digital camera, now makes it impossible for armies to restore effective censorship. “Photography now is so much easier than it has ever been,” said Philip Jones Griffiths, the acclaimed war photographer. “It means that everything is recordable and disseminated easily. “In the old days if a photographer shot something his proprietor did not like the pictures would not appear. Now images can go out on the internet, be picked up by any newspaper and be published. It is impossible for governments to stop them.”
The paradox of the Vesuvius eruption is that its destructiveness caused it to act as a giant preservative. When the great library at Alexandria caught fire 1,600 years ago, more than half a million scrolls were destroyed: the greatest intellectual catastrophe in history. But the tightly rolled papyri caught in the eruption of AD79 — not only in Herculaneum but also in Pompeii — were first carbonised and then, when the pumice and ash moulded around them, effectively sealed in airtight stone vaults.
If, as seems possible, many of the scrolls can be recovered then much writing of the ancients that has since been lost could be recovered, as the article speculates:
Even in our age of hyperbole it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation. We have, for example, a mere seven plays by Sophocles, yet we know that he wrote 120; Euripides wrote 90 plays, of which only 19 survive; Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90, of which we have just seven.
Of course it could be that actually what is recovered is 20 years of shopping lists, but this is yet another example of how technology allows us to do things that would be unthinkable just a few years ago. If nothing else this triad of articles shows that technology is just a tool. We have it in our power to do both good and bad, technology just magnifies both.