Don't be like a dinosaur in an IT age!

A friend from overseas asked one of my friends for his e-mail address, he was shocked to be given the office address. It sounded very much like a joke but it wasn't. It was a real incident!

Recently, a five-year-old boy was browsing my book and was quick to point out, "Oh! You have an e-mail address! So, can I e-mail to you?" Does it sound like another joke? No.

For people my generation, I think we would do ourselves a great service if we would take some time to break away from the old paradigm which believes that "IT is only for the newer and younger generations!"

Years back, I advised one of my business friends, who was then about 55 years old, and had been operating his traditional photo studio business for almost three decades, to consider incorporating digital printing facility in his studio as digital photography was catching on so swiftly over the last decade. He outrightly rejected my recommendation and said, "No way! That is for the young! I am so old already." So, I kept quiet.

A few years later, when I visited him again, I was utterly shocked and surprised to see that all his traditional photo processing equipment and facilities disappeared and were totally replaced with an entirely new system for digital printing. There was a new desktop PC, he and his wife were then clicking the mouse, navigating within the windows on the computer screen, and were using new vocabularies such as thumb drive, CD, jpg format, pixel, resolution etc.

I couldn't help but teased him and reminded him of what he said to me years ago, he humoured it off and laughingly told me, "Bo pian lah!" which means "No choice!".

It is true. We have no choice but to change and move along. If we don't evolve and change in this IT age, we would be like dinosaurs and would soon be displaced from our society that is so digital and wired.