How Trinidad and Tobago adapts technology successfully to its betterment is interconnected throughout the private sector and public sector in ways that most people don’t seem to realize.

Standing in a bookstore, searching for original minds on the latest ideas and thoughts, I noted the books on ‘Right Brain/Left Brain’ that have been made antiques by the neuroplasticity. The brain isn’t as left or right as people thought decades ago, and even now, and common knowledge still hasn’t picked up on it. The books I see that catch my eye are old; published in 2008 and earlier.

Readers are subjected to old ideas this way, and in a globally interconnected age, these are antiquated ideas.

The Internet propelled a global revolution in communications and business which is accelerating. Truth be told, our technology has trumped our ability to communicate. In Trinidad and Tobago, rather than embracing it’s changes, we adapt as slowly as allowing for bank card payments in Licensing Offices – 30 years late, maybe more.

Social media echoed journalists and opinions about Miss Universe and Trinidad and Tobago’s place on it- and then not long after, to mock Miss Trinidad and Tobago’s dress. Meanwhile, flooding from poor land management and poor planning has been forgotten after raking the ODPM over the coals – and now leptospirosis information makes it’s way around with 13 cases in less than a month. Articles sometimes tell only one side of a story, a testament to what readers want as opposed to what readers need to make informed decisions – the role of the fourth estate.

A video that was shared with myself and countless others on WhatsApp mentioned that we don’t have sufficient data related to agriculture. I’m not sure that we have sufficient data about anything, really, and it’s something that I’ve griped about for decades – about how we should have good data to make more informed decisions. And this takes us back to the bookstore, and back to the Internet.

We have not adapted to the world of technology as much as we have bent it to our whims in Trinidad and Tobago. This is not a complaint. It’s a statement. Change is coming, for good and bad. In the U.S., the brick and mortar retail businesses are in a last ditch effort to stay relevant to their market: Why wander a bookstore looking for the latest actual releases (as opposed to the last shipment) in the hope you will find one when you can pre-order on a website like Amazon.com? The same applies to almost anything someone wants or needs to buy.

Government Ministries have incompatible systems, and while the National ICT plan mentions open data, Data.tt doesn’t house much in the way of open data, and as far as useful data, we might be better off inspecting the bottom of tall boots after a flood. Retail prices for certain products are being watched – something I do welcome- but released in PDF, they’re hardly useful (CSV would be nice).

Did I mention that while payments at Licensing Offices will be more convenient – we can forget the last 30 years or so when we could have been doing it – but a visit still requires people to take hours, if not a day, away from their work? Computers purchased a decade and more ago might sit in back offices still, collecting dust as the customers do as well. Where they are is actually immaterial; it’s where those computers are not is the most telling. People stand in line waiting, victims of a bureaucracy that grinds the humanity out of us – nothing new in government offices.

We wonder what’s wrong. Where are the opportunities for the youth of today? Dr. Eric Williams once said that the future of Trinidad and Tobago was in the book bags of students; I wonder what he would say about mobile phones (or laptops, for that matter).

We have opportunities to leapfrog ahead, learning from the mistakes of others who have adapted or failed to adapt technology to better their societies – removing corruption by using technology to erode bureaucracy, enabling better journalism if only we would buy it rather than the social media echo chambers we live in. The odds are good that if we bought good journalism, we’d encourage it.

We look for solutions to purchase abroad when our most damaging export is our brain drain – where the youth of today, passionate and wanting to change things meet every reason why they cannot.