Doing your banking business online
One of the best things about the age of internet is doing your banking business online. It’s one of the things that people of my generation take for granted, one of the many things I suppose that have gotten that way thanks to the rapid advance of technology over the past thirty years.
Think of it. The term “banker’s hours,” which probably goes back to the middle ages, or maybe even before, no longer has any real meaning. Yes, the local branch may not be open terribly early or terribly late – but so what? Between the ATM and doing your banking business online, you almost never need to go to the local branch any more. The internet has changed everything, and made what were once frustrating, time consuming tasks so simple that we no longer remember how good we have it.
My girlfriend and I were discussing this just the other day. What, I wondered, did we do before TiVo? Personally, my life has completely changed thanks to TiVo. I almost never watch any television shows, even my favorites, when they’re scheduled anymore. And I can’t remember the last time I saw a commercial.
But there’s more. What did we do before cell phones? How did you know when and where to meet up? You had to make plans hours in advance. You had to keep to a schedule. You had to hope that your friends kept to a schedule – which I know my girlfriend, for one, is singularly incapable of. If not for cell phones, I may have broken up with her by now because of frustration at all the unwarranted waiting.
The big one, though, is what did we do before the internet? How did we look things up? Anything from your favorite song’s lyrics to your banking business online is just a few keystrokes away, easy enough to look up any time of the day or night provided you have a connection.
Even within the world of the internet, though, there are things that make it seem impossible that we ever lived without them. Wikipedia.org, for example, is something that barely existed in the early part of this decade. Today it’s probably the most linked source in the world, and easily one of the world’s busiest sites. Forget imagining what life was like without the internet; I can’t even imagine what life was like before certain web pages!
We’ve come a remarkably long way in recent years, and it’s to the good from my reckoning. Yes, information systems can be exploited. And doing your banking business online, for example, has inherent risks. But easier lines of communciation are a good thing. It’s axiomatic.
