Saturday, January 29, 2011

Online maps PK Locality Maps.. who wins?

I was at a rather ulu MRT station on the Circle Line today, running my errands. As I was walking back to the MRT station after my errand, a little boy, who looked like 9 or 10 years of age ran to me, asking me for the location of a church.

On his hand, was a I-phone, with the online map of the place near the MRT station and here, he was asking me where is the church? I thought he could not find the church on the i-phone map and being unfamilar with the locality of the place, I suggested him to take a look at the locality map in the MRT station. The boy was off in a tiffy and as I made my way down the escalator, he went up, and remarked to me that he has found the location of the church on the MRT locality map.

I thought that was an interesting episode I encountered that demonstrates that the ubiquitious nature of technology could still be insufficient or impractical. Nowadays, we can have the world at our hands with an iphone which hosts the internet. But sometimes, the i-phone is hard to use as the screen is too small. Also we have E-books, but nothing beats the feeling of touching paper and reading pages of real books.

I mean, technology can rule the world but it cannot replace paper, the brick and mortar and human relationships.

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