Not being a crotchety old naysayer, it’s not often that I find myself warning others to be careful what they wish for. Unsurprisingly, it’s even less infrequent that I warn myself – after all, unless what I’m wishing for is a poke in the eye or some sort of debilitating brain disease that makes me soil myself sporadically and without warning, what harm could come from a little wishful thinking? My wishes tend to be small, obtainable, pocket-sized wishes; a gold card, for instance, or world peace, and yet, when I am confronted with exactly what I think I want, it often comes as a surprise just how bloody unsatisfying satisfaction can be.
I was having a whinge the other day, over some fridge-chilled Corona in an air-conditioned Soho bar, how our lives were becoming increasingly dependant on technology. Having some time earlier received a text message informing me that my friend would be late, (seven minutes, to be exact) I thought it prudent to ponder how the mobile phone had taken the place of good timekeeping and, more importantly, good manners. Before mobile phones made almost every social faux pas bar adultery and murder acceptable, when you made a plan you stuck to it; meeting at eight thirty did not mean meeting at nine and bringing Pablo from the post room with you, it meant arriving at eight twenty-five and liking it. Nowadays, lateness doesn’t even enter the equation; the mobile phone has become the electronic get-out-of-jail-free card, and the text message the king’s pardon du jour. Don’t fancy turning up? Sod it, send a text. After all, at least you’ve let them know, right?
Being something of an old romantic, I waxed lyrical about a time gone by when preparing to leave the house meant not forgetting your keys and your bus fare: The halcyon days when cash wasn’t viewed as a relic and not every phone box was a makeshift urinal seemed somehow blissful in the comfortable neon half-light of my temperate London boozery. Growingly increasingly indignant about society’s dependence on technology to excuse good old fashioned rudeness, I reminisced, ignoring for a minute the fact that were it not for my laptop, my mobile phone and my oyster card my little Soho soiree would not actually have happened, of a time before inter-personal contact was so immediate, relentless and detached. And then I told a great big fat stinker of a lie: I could live happily without it all – no mobile, no laptop, no internet. Nothing.
Imagine my surprise then, when, deprived of my broadband connection for a mere eight hours, I was plunged into, not only total social isolation, but also something resembling blind panic.
Dependency is a frightening enough concept when we apply it to people. We all like to convince ourselves that we are strong, independent and driven; standing on our own two feet, after all, is one of the pivotal moments of our early development. It’s even more terrifying when we apply it to things. While I, like most people, am essentially a creature of habit, it came as something of a shock to realise how isolated and, more worryingly, how deprived I felt for the simple fact that I could not access my email. Not having been denied food, water or fresh air, my indignation is retrospectively embarrassing and petty; all I’d really been denied was the ability to sit on my arse having my brain assaulted by a limitless wave of easily accessible nonsense. And yet indignant, to my abject horror, I remained.
No one likes realising what a hypocrite they actually are, or, indeed, what a mindless drone they have allowed themselves to become. Despite my earlier protestation that such technology had made us lazy, isolated and rude, without it I felt quite astonishingly ineffective, isolated and rude. Emails went unanswered, plans went unmade and gossip when unspread. And perhaps worst of all was the fact that I felt the need to justify my withdrawal; claiming that a lack of internet was preventing my from working from home (work which had neither arrived, nor had I any intention of actually doing) was my only means of legitimising what is, essentially, a rather worrying internet addiction.
Three hours and four phone calls to an automated recorded voice telling me that the problem ‘would be sorted later today’, I decided to pull myself together and reacquaint myself with the real world. Sipping a lukewarm hazelnut Americano in an artificially-lit jazz-pumping Starbucks with an old friend might not have been exactly the return to a simpler time I’d been pining for, but it was a distinct improvement on trying to connect with an inanimate, unresponsive grey box.
Going through the seven stages of grief for what is essentially a gateway to donkey porn and videos of women falling off of ladders is something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry. We may live in an increasingly secular and distant society, and emails, text messages and Facebook pokes may be the only way we communicate with people we’d otherwise drift apart from, but at what cost does this maintained electronic contact come? The realisation that my social life still existed beyond a rickety broadband connection was hardly a eureka moment, but it was necessary nonetheless; it reminded me that every second spent exchanging electronic vodka shots with vague acquaintances was a second that could be far more valuably spent cultivating and maintaining real, tangible relationships with real, tangible people. And so I closed the lid, flicked off the switch, and went outside to play.
Technology is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but a little disentanglement was just the thing to blow the World Wide cobWebs away…
I was having a whinge the other day, over some fridge-chilled Corona in an air-conditioned Soho bar, how our lives were becoming increasingly dependant on technology. Having some time earlier received a text message informing me that my friend would be late, (seven minutes, to be exact) I thought it prudent to ponder how the mobile phone had taken the place of good timekeeping and, more importantly, good manners. Before mobile phones made almost every social faux pas bar adultery and murder acceptable, when you made a plan you stuck to it; meeting at eight thirty did not mean meeting at nine and bringing Pablo from the post room with you, it meant arriving at eight twenty-five and liking it. Nowadays, lateness doesn’t even enter the equation; the mobile phone has become the electronic get-out-of-jail-free card, and the text message the king’s pardon du jour. Don’t fancy turning up? Sod it, send a text. After all, at least you’ve let them know, right?
Being something of an old romantic, I waxed lyrical about a time gone by when preparing to leave the house meant not forgetting your keys and your bus fare: The halcyon days when cash wasn’t viewed as a relic and not every phone box was a makeshift urinal seemed somehow blissful in the comfortable neon half-light of my temperate London boozery. Growingly increasingly indignant about society’s dependence on technology to excuse good old fashioned rudeness, I reminisced, ignoring for a minute the fact that were it not for my laptop, my mobile phone and my oyster card my little Soho soiree would not actually have happened, of a time before inter-personal contact was so immediate, relentless and detached. And then I told a great big fat stinker of a lie: I could live happily without it all – no mobile, no laptop, no internet. Nothing.
Imagine my surprise then, when, deprived of my broadband connection for a mere eight hours, I was plunged into, not only total social isolation, but also something resembling blind panic.
Dependency is a frightening enough concept when we apply it to people. We all like to convince ourselves that we are strong, independent and driven; standing on our own two feet, after all, is one of the pivotal moments of our early development. It’s even more terrifying when we apply it to things. While I, like most people, am essentially a creature of habit, it came as something of a shock to realise how isolated and, more worryingly, how deprived I felt for the simple fact that I could not access my email. Not having been denied food, water or fresh air, my indignation is retrospectively embarrassing and petty; all I’d really been denied was the ability to sit on my arse having my brain assaulted by a limitless wave of easily accessible nonsense. And yet indignant, to my abject horror, I remained.
No one likes realising what a hypocrite they actually are, or, indeed, what a mindless drone they have allowed themselves to become. Despite my earlier protestation that such technology had made us lazy, isolated and rude, without it I felt quite astonishingly ineffective, isolated and rude. Emails went unanswered, plans went unmade and gossip when unspread. And perhaps worst of all was the fact that I felt the need to justify my withdrawal; claiming that a lack of internet was preventing my from working from home (work which had neither arrived, nor had I any intention of actually doing) was my only means of legitimising what is, essentially, a rather worrying internet addiction.
Three hours and four phone calls to an automated recorded voice telling me that the problem ‘would be sorted later today’, I decided to pull myself together and reacquaint myself with the real world. Sipping a lukewarm hazelnut Americano in an artificially-lit jazz-pumping Starbucks with an old friend might not have been exactly the return to a simpler time I’d been pining for, but it was a distinct improvement on trying to connect with an inanimate, unresponsive grey box.
Going through the seven stages of grief for what is essentially a gateway to donkey porn and videos of women falling off of ladders is something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry. We may live in an increasingly secular and distant society, and emails, text messages and Facebook pokes may be the only way we communicate with people we’d otherwise drift apart from, but at what cost does this maintained electronic contact come? The realisation that my social life still existed beyond a rickety broadband connection was hardly a eureka moment, but it was necessary nonetheless; it reminded me that every second spent exchanging electronic vodka shots with vague acquaintances was a second that could be far more valuably spent cultivating and maintaining real, tangible relationships with real, tangible people. And so I closed the lid, flicked off the switch, and went outside to play.
Technology is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but a little disentanglement was just the thing to blow the World Wide cobWebs away…
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