E-mails and files can multiply so rapidly as if someone had secretly put them in my folders. Since it's now so easy to obtain various information, we often keep information on our computers even though we don't have immediate or specific purposes for it. So, we regularly have to spend time and resources to "throw away" unnecessary information--something that never bothered us just a few years ago. To clear things out, we have to select things. And to select things, we have to know or understand them. That's what I recently discovered.
Maybe laziness is limitless and someday a computer system will be developed that can select and discard unnecessary things instead of by human users. Only a decade ago, no one could predict that computers would become such a reliable and indispensable part of daily life (though not perfectly reliable; perhaps that's why we love using computers). The number of Japanese Internet users is estimated to have reached 20 million, compared to a national population of 126 million... thatıs quite a milestone.
Before the election of the Japanese House of Representatives held in June, many candidates had set up and improved their own Web sites. Also, a number of election information sites were established and ballot simulations were conducted on the Internet. Information technology will be the top item on the agenda of the Kyushu-Okinawa Summit to be held this July. The "IT Charter" to be adopted at the summit talks will clearly state possible adverse influences of the digital divide between computer-literate and computer-illiterate people. The more convenient, the more problems--thatıs a truth in life. IT still requires so much of users that it cannot be called user-friendly.
I believe the key to using technologies developed by the RWC Project is their ease of use and how they will be delivered to those who will engineer them into easier-to-use forms of technology. Will the computer be able to decide which clothes I'll never wear again and clear them out for recycling or discard all unnecessary e-mails on my behalf? I wonder if such a "loafer-friendly" system will become reality.