It’s about time for South Africa catches up with the wonders of technology

I was wildly surprised when I found court cases being conducted over the internet in response to our lockdown.

It was the first major showing in ages of technology being used effectively. Unfortunately, it wasn’t borne out of the need of efficiency but rather necessity.

The technology of video conferencing has existed for at least a decade, so why did it take a global pandemic before it was even considered? It’s not just court cases but the entire process leading up to them. How long have we had the magic of email? Yet the system still insists on sending degreed candidate attorneys around town to serve and file affidavits.

Sure, it makes for a nice way to charge clients a tad extra but it’s still extraordinarily inefficient. Three hours to do something that could be done in three minutes, and be more environmentally friendly? Surely we can do better!

But we now stand at the cusp of an election, maybe, depending on the constitutional court. Yet a large consideration of whether to proceed with this election is the safety of people standing in lines to vote. This would never have been a thought if we embraced electronic voting.

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The criticism of it being open to abuse or manipulation has little evidence to back it up, and much like with physical ballots, one can easily build redundancies into it. Granted, there will be concerns of access and the like but one can never really address the concerns until one regards the system as possible.

Much like online court cases, there have been kinks but had we considered implementation years ago and worked out the kinks, we probably wouldn’t have had the issues we have now after being thrown into the deep end.

But it isn’t just the expedience that technology offers us that I yearn to embrace. It’s what’s right in front of us right now.

Go onto any social media platform and search “party [city name]” and you’ll find a bunch of rowdy young adults having the time of their lives drinking and dancing in crowded “restaurants”. Good on them for living their lives and all that but remind me why we’re under lockdown. Oh yes, there’s this virus and apparently we need to be careful about that.

The problem is that many of us understand, yet still resent, the restrictions. It’s difficult not to resent the restrictions when you’ve taken a financial hit, then open Instagram only to see that closing down your auto repair shop for a few months was for naught, and parties are going on seemingly with no repercussions.

You’d think that if there is a problem with youth unemployment, a great way to employ youth would be to hire them into the police and National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

You could then let them do what they love by surfing social media and finding local parties, reporting them and having the cops go out and issue fines to these establishments based on actual video and photographic evidence.

But alas, South Africa. We have some sort of inability to reconcile ourselves with the opportunity that technology presents other than sharing narcissistic self-indulgent content.

Remember when your parents paid for meals at a restaurant with a credit card but instead of an electronic machine it was this bulky swipe thing that made a carbon imprint of the card? Remember filling in annoying forms at Home Affairs to get your passport? Remember when you had a Betamax player with a remote control that you had to plug in with a wire? Remember cheques?

Technology has made our lives better in so many ways yet we’re still overly hesitant to see all the potential for what it could be. Why, oh why, am I still stamping documents to prove that I’ve received them? Urgh!

More importantly, why oh why am I still getting out of bed to vote?