technological web

It’s raining and we’re driving home one afternoon, when I see this lady walking down the street. She’s just hopped off the bus and is now picking her way through the traffic on the road, an umbrella over her head, grinning to herself and opening and closing her mouth. Of course. She’s talking into a mobile phone. After all these years of mobile phone technology I still find it weird to think about people wandering about the city and all over the countryside accompanied by their private phones with their own private numbers!

Years ago I used to sometimes fantasize about it. About being able to go to the park or to walk down the street with something resembling a cordless phone in your bag. And how it would ring and you would be able to answer it wherever you were, and not having to hang around the house waiting for “that important call you couldn’t afford to miss” but to feel free to go where you wanted and be able to speak to whom you wanted, when you wanted to (or they wanted to). And now it’s not only happened, but the instruments are less than a quarter the size of a normal cordless and soon they will become microscopic chips which you just stick into your ear – only to operate those you will need powerful eyes and really tiny fingers. So maybe mobile phones will ultimately lead to some major evolutionary changes in the human race!

Except of course you do wonder at the end of the day, when you hear mobiles going ding ding ding and zipetty do dah ding, at the hairdressers or in restaurants or in movie halls, on the oddest of occasions, whether modern technology has brought us further in life or whether all this complicated and advanced know how, is being used to spin yet a few more threads in the web of addiction in which most of us are caught one way or another, and which will swallow us up whole, some day.

I sometimes think about computers and how dependent many of us are on the system. What would happen if there were a world wide failure of electricity or a world wide computer crash? What about all the trading and the securities and banking and our money? What about people like me who almost can’t write any more with a pen?! (I actually get cramps in my fingers and my hand if I sit with a pen for more than fifteen minutes at a time! And once upon a time I sat for examinations lasting for three hours!).

For this reason I am writing with a pen for at least two or three minutes a day – just in case. Hopefully a few of us will manage to extricate ourselves from the web!