Book reflection

The book I have read is ”Casualty management guidelines” (ISBN 978-1-906915-39-1) published by The Nautical Institute, the reason that I chose this book is twofold, it is an interesting topic and I got the book at a seminar at work and should have read it a long time ago. There are 13 chapters in the book, covering every possible topic in a ship disaster – from the roles of the shipmaster, the ship-owner and the harbour master to insurance and how to deal with media.

I will take this opportunity to discuss one topic that has been on my mind for quite some time now what effect does dealing with others' catastrophes have on us? When you spend most of your time at work preparing for a disaster and kind of hoping for something dramatic to happen to practise your skills? Can you imagine how boring it would be to be a doctor if no one ever gets sick? Or a police if there is no criminality? But can you say that out loud without people thinking that you are insane? Helping out when something did not turn out the way it should have, weather it is a ship hitting the quay, a child breaking a leg or people taken hostage, is of course an honourable task but it do involve the suffering of others.

I am working with technical support to ship-owners and colleagues around the world, they contact us if there is a grounding, a damaged rudder or if cracks are found in the hull structure, for instance. In addition to that I am part of our emergency team, dealing with ship disasters as described in the book. My work days get really interesting and exciting when something happens and we have to mobilize a team of people to handle the case and give advice about the damages and how to do proper repairs. That means that in order for me to have something interesting to do at work, something bad has to happen to someone else, i.e. the ship-owner or ship crew. So far, there have not been any accidents when I have been on duty, which of course is good but it is also boring. We run exercises with the ship owners which is interesting and gives us a good chance to practice what we know and tune our emergency procedures, but exercises are not as interesting as real cases which are normally more complex (as one can learn from reading the book). When I tell my friends that I find it exciting with ship collisions I always have to add – provided there are no injuries or fatalities. After I read the book I find it even more interesting with casualties and all the different professions involved solving the problems, but I hope that my next duty week will be as quiet as the previous one, at least outside normal office hours. 

Droids

The first thought that struck my mind when I listen to the TED-talk ”Are droids taken our jobs” was – is working full time something we really have to do or is it just the norm we have been living by for the past century or so? Will the future bring a greater flexibility to our working life? Droids will probably change or way of looking at work just like the industrial revolution did.

My second thought was that it is amazing how many people nowadays who make their living from non-essential work, like writing blog posts about their life, playing sports for a living or any kind of entertainment. If, or rather when, droids will do a lot of the manual labour we are doing today, we will have plenty of time to come up with new professions and new ways of earning money. It will be interesting to see what the next decade will bring when it comes to technological development. When I started university 15 years ago mobile phones were almost only used for making phone calls (very costly phone calls) and today most of us are carrying a smartphone with us all the time. We have to embrace the development but at the same time it is wise to be a bit sceptical and disconnected from time to time. 

The future of technology is exciting and I hope I will be able to keep up with at least some of the development. 

Social media - broader view or more narrow-minded?

The article "From relationships to revolutions: seven ways Facebook has changed the world" gives good examples of how social media has changed the way we communicate and live our lives, how we get in touch and keep in touch with others and how we may influence the world. But is it actually giving us a broader view of the world or does social media makes us more narrow-minded?

Let me first elaborate a bit on what I mean about making us more narrow-minded. On Facebook I am friends with people I know from school, high school, university, work and spare time activities in addition to relatives. Most of my friends are quite similar to me, they have a university degree (most of them within engineering), a full time job, go for vacation a couple of times a year and live what one would call middle class lives. When I scroll down my news feed I see articles and pages my friends like, I click on some and the more I read about one topic the more news and adds I will get on that topic, and less on other topics. See my point here? My friends are similar to me, hence we like similar things and our view on the world will be reinforced by the way social media and search engines work, we are constantly fed with opinions and information that matches what we already are interested in, and I'm positive that it makes us more narrow-minded.

Do you remember when the newspaper was something you got on your front step in the mornings? If you are like me you probably read your favourite sections first, but while doing so, you at the same time casted a glance at some other headlines or photos or even read article about topics you were not that interested in. When I read news online it is not very often I click on an article if the headline does not manage to draw my attention immediately, I am a lot more picky when it comes to what deserves an extra click compared to start reading the next article in a paper newspaper or magazine. Same goes for television, watching the evening news on public service television probably gives me a broader view of the world than my news feed on Facebook.

On the other hand, social media has for sure broaden our views in that sense that we can make contact and stay in contact with people almost anywhere in the world. We can get first-hand information about almost any topic and arrange online gathering to learn more. At least if we actively search for it. Information is so easily available today but the amount is massive and we have to chose what to read and watch. 

So, how about if the sites proposed to you were based on which topics you never search for? Or if the online book store would tell you ”people who bought book A did not buy book Y, want to have a look?” That would broaden our view for sure. I once discussed this possibility with a software engineer, he did not think such a search function would be possible, but I do not see why it would not? Not as the default option, but why not have a tick-off box for ”surprise me”? 

What do you think, have social media like Facebook broaden your view of the world?

This blog

This blog is purely for the course "English for Science & Technology 1" which I am attending this autumn at Karlstad University (KAU).