At the expense of making myself sound really old, I grew up on the other side of the technological divide. Computers at home weren’t at all common until I was late into my childhood, and the internet didn’t normally exist for individuals until I was well into high school. (I learned to type on a manual typewriter.) We were pretty advanced having a phone in the car during the teen years, and it was a car phone, not a cell (for the, like, thirty seconds they existed, before mobiles made them obsolete.) Hell, I remember rotary dials. And when cordless phones were seriously cool. Getting to talk to friends long-distance on the phone was a Very Big Deal.
That said, I am, of course, currently living in the modern world. I’ve had a cell for about eight years, and I honestly can’t think how my adult life would have functioned without one. I don’t know that I’d have been as comfortable living abroad were it not for the wonders of the internet, which makes it possible for me to be constantly in touch with the people I left behind. I’m not terribly tech savvy or au courant with the latest gadgets and gizmos (SA, for example, has a cell phone with so much on it that I’m pretty sure it can actually make julienne fries, and it would take me longer to read the manual, much less understand it, than the thing’s shelf life). As far as I’m concerned, phones and computers do things these days that no one actually needs them to do. For my part, as long as I can basically talk or write letters with them, computers and phones are doing their job; nothing more is required.
This does not stop me from being amazed at how well they do this job, however. For example: James and Adrienne took off this morning for Boston, to visit James’s parents before I meet them next week in Chicago for the Kalamazoo conference. SA called Adrienne’s cell phone to tell her that she’d been cast in Richard III without auditioning (which could be the topic for a whole other entry, but I’m saving all that for tomorrow). I see this, since the phone is here in the UK, and find Adrienne online via Instant Messenger, and relay the information. She then finds SA online with another programme, gets the whole story, and relays it to me. SA lives about three miles down the road from me, but I get this information via my roommate who’s in Boston. By the same token, my mum often gets gossip and news from me about people in her hometown, that I get from skulking around Facebook and friends’ blogs, even though I live in England and they are practically in her backyard.
Really, you think that these items exist for business, or data processing, or the government, or any such high-flown reason, but the truth is that they exist because they make it damned easy for us to spread gossip. (And I don’t want to get any emails about how gossip is morally wrong or something. First, I don’t care, second, I don’t hold with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and third, as far as I’m concerned, gossip is really just either ‘news’ good and proper, or ‘concerned sharing’.) It must’ve been so much harder when you had to go over to your neighbour’s house to share the latest information, and so much more obvious that you were doing it. When her mum and sister were visiting and irritating her, Adrienne and I sat across the living room messaging one another snarkily: no one was the wiser, and it gave her the chance to vent. You couldn’t do that a hundred years ago. And, let’s face it, this is what ninety-nine percent of the world is actually using mobiles or the ’net to do. Not saving the world or finding a cure for cancer: it’s so that we can talk about one another and what little intrigues our various intertwined lives are playing out.
And the data trails! We know so much about court and political intrigues of earlier eras from surviving documents, but if those people had had access to the internet or cell phones, they would have got away with a hell of a lot more. Admittedly, history might be a lot duller (picture Mary Queen of Scots and the scandal of... the Casket Text Messages?). Ironically, in this so-called information age, and the massive government invasiveness (if any of America’s Big Brother snoops are reading this, you and your country suck the big one), when it comes to the everyday scandals and secrets, it’s a hell of lot easier to get the information across. The fact that information from York, to York, can come via Boston is amazing to me- not so much technologically speaking- I’m not clever enough to understand the tech of it- but because the sheer ridiculousness of trivialities, like cast lists, shooting around the globe between three of us in about thirty seconds is simply absurd.
It makes me wonder what’s next. Because I can’t imagine being much more efficient in “shared information” than this- but I’m sure that eventually someone is going to try.
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