Hall & Partners: Connect

Page 75

Connect

I have two boys, twins, aged 17. One of their favorite games on Xbox Live is Call of Duty, a massive multi-player, first-person war game in which you’re a member of a platoon fighting in the Second World War. Your comradesin-arms could be boys from your class, or 30-year-old women from Hong Kong, it doesn’t matter. I hear the boys chattering away on their headphones, barking out orders, telling people to look out, or get down. When they die, perhaps shot by the son of a Polish sheet metal worker or an Ecuadorian horse rancher, their on-screen avatar lies down for a beat and then jumps up and starts again.

collaborate, in real time, with someone on the other side of the world as easily as your brother in the same room. Will they be as wedded to an office as I am? Probably not.

In Victorian England boy-children were taught by their war games that dying for King and country, Leviathan, was valorous and honorable. My boy-children are still playing war games, but what they’re learning is that it’s possible to

Wireless beach-working has been a trope of IT advertising for decades now, but it’s not enough that technology can make something possible; the users of that technology have to want what’s possible and be comfortable with it. I suspect that

It’s not enough that technology can make something possible

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