Technology

I am not usually bothered by technology. You get used to it, don’t you? I mean, it’s everywhere so you really have no choice. You want to write something, you turn on your computer; you want to send a message to someone, you type it in on your phone; you want to see someone, you Skype them. There is a machine for everything now – every little part of everyday life that we don’t want to have to think about for longer than a second is now facilitated by machines.

But what has this done to us?

The issue of this, as I said, often does not present itself to me in my day-to-day life because I, like you, am usually surrounded by machines. These, although they are not usually directly connected to me, act as a kind of life support – allowing me to connect with the world, to work and create things that form the end product of all that work, to see and hear things that interest me such as movies, music, books, newspapers etc. I could go on . . . and on . . . and on.

I am now lost without my computer and I despair when it breaks down.

And when I despair I ask myself why the hell I have placed myself in a situation where I am now almost completely dependent on all this stuff? At times like these I remember the time, back in my teenage years in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when I didn’t have any of these things – no laptop, no broadband, no iPod. This was, I might add, largely because these things either didn’t exist, or just because I didn’t know they existed, or that they were in any way necessary to me. When I was 15 I bought my first mobile phone and thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was the first and only phone I had ever had; and it was only a simple, lumpy, brick-like, ordinary phone with an aerial on the top.

Remember the days when mobiles had aerials? And, like, actual buttons instead of touch screens? . . . I loathe my iPhone with fiery passion, largely because, apart from the basics, I don’t actually know how it works. Plus, no matter how much other people rave about them I will never think that a touch screen is a better invention than good old-fashioned push-buttons. I wouldn’t have a phone at all actually if I could help it, but I have to have one now because it’s my only lifeline if my computer crashes, plus it’s handy sometimes if I’m out and need to check on something.

Most of my day-to-day business is conducted through the internet now, and I reckon that’s how it is for a lot of people. I can’t – I mean, literally, can’t keep away from it. I’m just one of those freaks who sleeps with their phone and laptop right near them. And it’s not even that my life has to be bound to these things, it’s just that I’ve put myself into the situation where everything I do sort of relies on them. And it is easier now, isn’t it? To do everything online and text the people you know instead of seeing them and having actual conversations. It’s insane. How did I get to this, I ask myself?

But it’s not just me, is it? It’s the whole world who’s become obsessed with things like Kindle, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and God knows what else. It’s so easy now to keep in touch with people, do business, order shopping etc. online and never see anyone and, for a generation of increasingly agoraphobic or socially disinclined people, this is totally brilliant. Because you can do everything now that you used to do outside your house from the comfort of your living room, bedroom, whatever, and convince yourself, while you do it that this is real social interaction and real life.

I know. I’ve done it. I do it. I live through my laptop and my phone more than I live out in the real world. And if the machines conk out on me then that’s me in the dark.

So, what’s the point then? What have we driven ourselves to? . . . Well, the whole point of technology in the first place, ostensibly, was to make our lives easier and give us more time in a world where the work was increasing and the time allotted for it was becoming ever narrower. It was a convenience thing that was supposed to allow people to do their daily work faster and more efficiently so that they would then have more time for themselves in which to relax and, you know, live. But, as the old saying goes: “Work Expands to Fill the Time Available”. Machines may have been invented to free up time, but, at a certain point, it was decided that all this free time needed to be filled with something else. So there was then a need for more machines to create entertainment and other work possibilities during the newly created leisure hours.

The result of all this, then, is that we’ve become a generation of techno-heads who wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t attached to something electrical, battery operated and possibly flashing an Apple symbol. We have no survival instincts any more because we use things like Sat Nav, or GPS if you’re American, to get us around or, worse, we use some “app” on our now so necessary iPhones to tell us the answer to all our questions or concerns. We no longer have to think about anything, or puzzle over anything, because now there is an app for everything. You hear a song on the radio that you can’t name, there’s an app to find out what it’s called. You need to Google something while you’re on a bus or buying cheese, there’s a Google app. You need to take a picture of yourself while you’re flossing your teeth and the computer is all way down the hall: Instagram!
Here’s what I’m worried about though: What are we going to do if there is a mass power outage, or if the internet, somehow, fails. What if someone pulls the plug? It would be like being back in the dark ages. How would we cope? Because I do not, for the life of me, remember how I coped before technology took over my life.

I have just spent the whole of last weekend fighting with my computer – eventually having to move out of the comfy but grindingly slow living space that was my old laptop and set up home in a new one. This, you may be able to imagine then, is the reason for this post. I absolute hate technology – when it breaks – but I can’t live without it. And I hate that too. It just occurs to me at times like this, when I get a glimmer of what it might feel like to have none of these things around me and have to be completely cut off from my blog, my Facebook page and my many other online outlets, that the world we live in now is really badly designed and really precariously poised on the top of a great pile of machinery and virtual space.

What have we done to our world? It used to be beautiful and simple, now it’s all metal and plastic and Pentium chips. Not even that any more probably, everything exists on a virtual cloud now, doesn’t it? Soon it won’t even be boxes and wires that run our lives for us but a big virtual nexus that we all just float about in. . . . Ok getting a bit metaphysical there, but it scares me sometimes that we’ve lost the ability to do actual things in life and we just leave it all up to far more capable electronic devices. And, if I’m honest, I kind of miss my childhood when technology meant a wooden box TV without a remote control and when CD players looked radical and new age. In the last twenty years or so we’ve all become conditioned to think that life is not worth living unless you have every single new gadget on the market and make daily use of it.

I think about junking it all. And I really could do it.

. . .

But then I remember that I have to update my Twitter page and all that goes out of the window. Because that’s the world we live in now – horrible and doomed to ultimate destruction as it may be – technology is mandatory now. We could exist in theory, but we literally could not function without it.