The Ridge Mouth
Strap yourself in for a loud and powerful whinge about the perils and pitfalls of technology.
I am the last person in the world I would have expected to become a technology geek. If you ask me what the first things that come into my head are, you’ll get words like “garden, field, mountain, sea, family and dogs”. Dogs (in case you were wondering) because they are attached to the natural world and closely tied to family. To cut it short, I am a man of the outdoors, fresh air, the ocean, hiking… I dream of living on a farm.
But then along comes the modern world and its demands, like the need to make cash to pay for house, car, food, dogs, television, lights, water, computers, cellphone, some form of social life, holidays, clean underwear, etc, etc and so on. And, let’s face it, there are very few jobs anywhere in the world today where you’re free from the relentless pressure of computers, laptops, internet, ADSL, bandwidth, Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, MySpace and all those blasted usernames and passwords that all these things require. Backing up contacts, usernames and passwords could become a job all on its own in the near future.
It’s particularly impossible to escape this lot when you work in the media. In this rather chaotic, urgent industry, you’ve got to be connected to get the story, or to get the story out there. E-mail inboxes are terrifying behemoths with a life of their own: the more work you do, the more muscular they become. Printers and faxes never work, of course. And should you have anything to do with the internet and online communication, your life becomes one long series of clicks, replies, posts, links, e-mails, tweets, blogrolls… there was even a “tweetdeck” the other day. That was probably pushing it a bit.
The alarming thing about all this is that the more you resist, the more you seem to get sucked in. The technological world is as exasperating as it is alluring. You know you’re in deep trouble when you’re at home tapping out an SMS, you’ve got the laptop on the go and your partner’s in the next room bashing out an e-mail on the tower PC. In the bedroom your teenage son is fiercely mixing it, while he scrolls with the other hand through his iPod playlist. The other one is downloading music to his cellphone, while he allegedly studies… amazingly, from a real book.
Yes, at times it can all be rather baffling. I think it was Chris Rea who sang, “I don’t know what it is, but I love it”. Say no more . . .
PS. Don’t text me your comments, just scroll down and submit a reply. Till next time.