Digital farmers: September 16, 1996 issue of New Thinking

September 16, 1996 New Thinking:
Digital farmers

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September 16, 1996

Digital farmers

By Gerry McGovern

If history repeats itself, is it because time is a circle rather than a line?

There is the impression that we are always moving forward. Maybe it is not quite as it seems. After all, the world is round, not linear. All planets are round too. There is night, there is day and then there is night again. There is Spring, Autumn, Summer, Spring. Empires have risen only to fall. Nothing goes on forever.

When we say that history repeats itself what we usually mean is that a similar political pattern is emerging now that emerged fifty or a hundred years ago. Could it also be a similar social pattern, that life is like the seasons, changing only to return to some beginning?

Sometimes I wonder whether we have seen the digital age before; only this time we have different tools.

I think of the way my parents, grandparents and neighbors worked on the land. The land was not a job that started at 9 and ended at 5. The more you wanted to own the land, the more the land owned you. Working the land was a way of life. I remember a neighbor once saying that they never wanted to take a holiday, because they simply wouldn’t know what to do if they did.

To me, information is the land of the digital age. It requires constant tending. Working the information is a way of life. The more I want to own it, the more it seems to own me. The more I know of it, the more it sucks me in.

No farmer was ever finished their work. You milked the cows in the morning, delivered the milk to the creamery, cleaned the byre out, washed the milk buckets and cans, fed the calves, sowed, tended or harvested some crop, repaired a gate, cleared out a ditch, began draining a field, worried about too much or too little rain, watched over the cow who was about to calve, and when you were about to do something else, you realized that it was time to go up for the cows again. The day began with light and ended with night.

The Industrial Age with its big machines that made machines that made things that made life easier, made the forty hour working week with the same precision it made a car or tractor. Work became a product. It was packaged, defined, became a unit of time. We saw work as something that happened in the workplace, and living something that happened at home or in the pub.

The digital age is bringing work back home, and it is blurring the lines between what is work and what is living. Industrial Age education was nicely ordered into x number of years in schools and universities. Digital age education is about life-long learning, about learning from everything we do and the information around us.

I can’t help but feel that I have become a digital age farmer, tied to my information like my parents were tied to the land. I am farming information, an agricultural boy who must sow, tend and reap, with the ever present knowledge that this year’s work is for this year’s crop, and that next year the whole process must start again.

Gerry McGovern

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I can’t help but feel that I have become a digital age farmer, tied to my information like my parents were tied to the land.