Tomorrow begins a new year. It wouldn't be that big of a deal except it also begins a new century and computer programmers during the 1970s did not plan for that. Although I doubt that a Y2K calamity awaits us tomorrow, I do believe the fact that we have been talking about a computer glitch all year signals how we have entered into the computer age.
If the turn of the century happened twenty years ago, a Y2K glitch couldn't even have been seen by the most fearful person as a problem. Frankly, computers weren't deployed the way they are today. Now computers and computer chips are ubiquitous.
For that matter who would have predicted even a year or two ago that so many ads on television would be for Internet dot-com addresses? Who would have predicted so much online shopping? The rapid deployment of computers and its effect on society is mind boggling.
As I discussed yesterday, we are in the midst of a computer age and an information age. The two go hand-in-hand. The computer has become helpful in managing knowledge at a time when the amount of information is expanding exponentially. The information stored in the world's libraries and computers doubles every eight years.
This is one of the great challenges for Christians in this coming century. How will computers affect us? How will we manage all of this information? Will Christians have a significant presence on the information superhighway?
These are the real questions we will have to address. So let's get tomorrow out of the way and see what the new year brings. But then we need to begin to concentrate on what the new century will bring and how we as Christians will respond.
I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.