By John Mokwetsi
Maybe in the not so distant future we will have the liberty to use the cyberspace in Zimbabwe for more important things than Facebooking and googling our way to a college Degree.
We might discover the joys and misfortunes of mobile banking, online banking, online shopping and e-learning through sharing sites like Youtube and journal and book portals like Sage publications.
The kind of convenience that allows you to order Pizza from the comfort of your home using a mouse and a keyboard, or better still pay an extra $3 for all your groceries to be delivered on your doorsteps after you have gone into the virtual world, shelf to shelf online on a website of OK or TM supermarket.
I am talking about that kind of connected world that allows you to never again carry money (bricks of Zim dollars or the Yen, whatever we will use then), a world where a QR Code scanner on your Blackberry or Iphone can be your bus ticket or movie ticket.
It is almost a utopian thought when you imagine everyone being able to avoid the long banking queues by just fiddling on those touch screens of the smartphones we love;so as to transfer money across cities or even oceans.
What about looking at the newspaper vendor with that obvious contemptuous mirth, as if to deride him of lack of swag, as you access the Ipad version of your favourite newspaper instead of the troubles of trying to read a broadsheet like the Herald in a commuter omnibus.
So I imagine Zimbabwe ( a year, 10, 20 years from now)will be a paper moneyless society as I see here in the UK where plastic money is all I ever use to function. I am imagining (rather pessimistically) after Econet's fibre optic talk get into the real walk, and banks and the urban space follow suit with investments into digital platforms, this is the direction we will be taking.
While I am excited by the prospect of a digitally connected Zimbabwe I was forced to look at the downside of it all. I imagine Mbare Musika might not be a place a pick pocket would rather be to get that $10 off your jean back pocket after we all resort to using the Visa card for cash transactions.
Crime might get more complicated and more aggressive than a wallet snatch if I am to read too much into a new police communication in the UK that says knifepoint robberies have gone up ten percent in the 12 months to September 2011 as more people carry smartphones. ebooks, and Ipads. There has been a rise in the killings from previous years because of these gadgets everyone seems to love only next to their pets.
Forget the more complicated crimes in which hackers can get your online banking details in what is known as "phishing".
This phishing is loosely when fraudsters trick people into entering their personal details on a website or in an e-mail.
It is that moment in an alley in Glenview when cornered by a scar-faced guy and the other the size of the Reserve Bank building, when the shiny Ipad 2 or the Iphone 4S becomes your death trap, that scares me. I may be cynical but remember when we get there that I warned the fibre optic set to make us all networked into the new technology and way of life might also give us more than convenience.
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