MISSOURI WATCH: IN AN INTERNET WORLD, THERE ARE STILL SOME PRACTICAL QUESTIONS

One of the most bewildering and, at the same time, one of the most frustrating aspects of our new computerized Age of Technology, with all of its language and gadgetry, is how it can exist and prosper in a world that in so many ways is still connected to the last century.

The other morning in church I heard a grandmother tell a friend she had spent the previous day engaged in e-mail with a distant acquaintance, someone she had known on a casual basis several decades earlier. Just what this woman and her e-mail buddy found in common was each one's active existence in a new, computerized world, and the difficulties each had at times experienced in connecting with kindred souls.

In this month's Atlantic magazine, one of the nation's best known observers of contemporary society, Dr. Peter F. Drucker, contends that the explosive emergence of the Internet will shortly provide the major worldwide distribution channel for goods, services and management and professional jobs. He even foresees the development of new industries from this unexpected commerce, listing biotechnology and fish farming as the best examples of the moment. I don't have the intellectual knowledge of Dr. Drucker, but I suspect that biotechnology would have emerged as a new field with or without the Internet since chemists, being chemists, are more concerned with whatever it is they do than electronic screens on their desks. As for fish farming, this is hardly a new industry, since in certain parts of Missouri and neighboring venues fish farmers have been engaged in their occupation long enough to have enjoyed the early, financially lucrative days and are now in the too-damn-many-fish-farmers stage.

Nevertheless, giving Drucker his due, let's suppose that what he predicts for the future comes to pass, and 75 or 85 percent of our lives are spent e-mailing every part of our business, intellectual and social lives to people we barely know or whose identity we don't have the slightest clue. Let's say you and I achieve Bill Gates' nirvana and can conduct our entire lives from a computer, equipped with Microsoft's latest programming, and that we never have to stir to have our homes or offices to become gigantic economic, intellectual and professional successes. Let's take a gigantic step for Science and assume this happens.

Well, at some point, I expect someone, perhaps an intellectual as brilliant as Drucker, finds himself living in what the good doctor predicts will be "one economy and only one market, where the competition is not local anymore because it knows no boundaries." Tired of his new e-world, our imaginary intellectual begins to reminisce about the last century, the one we're presently living through. And suppose this new technological man asks himself, "Whatever happened to the problems we were worrying about in the old days, when the non-geriatric Bill Clinton was president and Wall Street was the alpha-and-omega for most of the world's wealthy?" "Whatever happened to those kids, now drawing much smaller Social Security checks, who seemed unable to write or speak a coherent sentence and who went to schools that incapable of educating them in little more than driver's ed?"

There might be some other questions that will cross this future intellectual's mind as he struggles, often vainly, to remember the good old days. "Did we ever solve that haunting problem of the rich getting richer and the poor staying even, or did it just dissolve into thin air?" "Did we ever get the health-care needs problem solves, and if we didn't, what happened to all those people who never got beyond the third and final HMO rejection for transplant?"

There are some other matters this 21st century intellectual might wonder about. Here's a list of a few of them, hammered out on my old Underwood typewriter, after cleaning off all the cobwebs:

"Did Missouri ever get that mostly underfunded 15-Year road plan finished?"

"I forget, but did the U.S. Supreme Court uphold Missourians' efforts to reduce some of the ungodly and dangerous special-interest contributions to political candidates?"

"Did Missouri ever rewrite its ancient Constitution and bring modern-day governance to millions of citizens who seemed to have no interest in how they were governed as long as they could complain about how much it cost?"

"Is the state still electing 197 members of the General assembly, when half that number could do a more efficient job and save millions of dollars in doing so?"

"Does Worth County now have more than 500 men, women, children and chickens?"

"Did the Mizzou football team ever beat the Nebraska Cornhuskers?"

"Were they able to identify the last family that moved out of St. Louis City?"

"Did they ever resolve the abortion issue?"

"Did the Cardinals ever win another pennant?"

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.