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The year after next it will be two decades since I first heard about the internet. In those days it was still dubbed 'the information superhighway', and the people who canvassed for businesses working with it were, as I recall, offering the human equivalent of today's search engines. I was running a small corporate magazine business in London and introducing the new electronic publishing equipment. From a strictly business point of view, this other, new technology seemed as incomprehensible as DTP was demonstrably 'What You See is What You Get'.
The salesman was offering a desktop accessible information service: we would put questions to his people via a modem and they would in turn source the answers on the superhighway and reply to us electronically. He spoke volubly about the network of supercomputers left over from the Cold War that were now 'talking' to one another, but for someone such as myself, who had been educated in a pre-computer era, I found the entire concept extremely hard to grasp.
While I applauded the notion that these silicone swords were being beaten into researching ploughshares, I couldn't understand how it was that giant US defence computers could be used so promiscuously. I was wedded to the idea that a technology must be 'owned' in order to be viable. That the actual location of these information nodes was - to all intents and purposes - immaterial, made my head spin. Added to this, while our design computers - Macintoshes - were operating on a click-and-point user interface, we still had older computers which depended on keystroke commands.
In 1990 I left the corporate world to become a full time writer and regressed to yet more primitive technology; so it took another six years before I acquired my own state-of-the-art pc and internet server. Then, as a working journalist, what most impressed me about the internet - as it had become - was the ease with which I could file copy. At that time the national newspapers were only just beginning to put their archives on-line, and such phenomena as on-line shopping, blogs and ubiquitous commercial web sites were still in their infancy. The phenomenon whereby I could instantaneously transmit text, then respond to editorial interventions with equal rapidity, made me a complete convert. It was curiously satisfying - like some peculiar kind of mental evacuation - to despatch large wads of text with a push of a button. And, of course, in time these became larger and larger, until my most recent novel - all 160,000-odd words of it - was 'delivered' by email to my publisher.
Email itself was a further revelation. I loved the way that quite dizzying exchanges of gossip and witticism could take place. The new medium seemed to have the ease and rapidity of a phone call, while calling upon one's interlocutors to revert to the niceties of a more epistolatory age. Added to this I was becoming increasingly phobic about using the phone at all - an occupational hazard of the self-employed. All sorts of ugly situations could be defused, it seemed to me, via the agency of keyboard and modem.
When people talk nowadays about 'information overload' and the way the internet has clogged up their lives, I'm inclined to that - to paraphrase Marshal MacLuhan - they are projecting their own message on to this essentially 'value null' medium. These are the same people who mindlessly surf the innumerable cable tv stations, or obsessively do Sudoko and Crosswords - their cooption of the internet into their psychic realm of point and click. I would wager these are the same types who find it impossible not to use their mobile phones to tell someone else where they are, or their satellite navigation system to get to the supermarket. It is they who have - as a self-fulfilling prophecy - dubbed the Blackberry the 'crackberry', and cannot forego from checking their email in-boxes every few seconds.
The salesman was offering a desktop accessible information service: we would put questions to his people via a modem and they would in turn source the answers on the superhighway and reply to us electronically. He spoke volubly about the network of supercomputers left over from the Cold War that were now 'talking' to one another, but for someone such as myself, who had been educated in a pre-computer era, I found the entire concept extremely hard to grasp.
While I applauded the notion that these silicone swords were being beaten into researching ploughshares, I couldn't understand how it was that giant US defence computers could be used so promiscuously. I was wedded to the idea that a technology must be 'owned' in order to be viable. That the actual location of these information nodes was - to all intents and purposes - immaterial, made my head spin. Added to this, while our design computers - Macintoshes - were operating on a click-and-point user interface, we still had older computers which depended on keystroke commands.
In 1990 I left the corporate world to become a full time writer and regressed to yet more primitive technology; so it took another six years before I acquired my own state-of-the-art pc and internet server. Then, as a working journalist, what most impressed me about the internet - as it had become - was the ease with which I could file copy. At that time the national newspapers were only just beginning to put their archives on-line, and such phenomena as on-line shopping, blogs and ubiquitous commercial web sites were still in their infancy. The phenomenon whereby I could instantaneously transmit text, then respond to editorial interventions with equal rapidity, made me a complete convert. It was curiously satisfying - like some peculiar kind of mental evacuation - to despatch large wads of text with a push of a button. And, of course, in time these became larger and larger, until my most recent novel - all 160,000-odd words of it - was 'delivered' by email to my publisher.
Email itself was a further revelation. I loved the way that quite dizzying exchanges of gossip and witticism could take place. The new medium seemed to have the ease and rapidity of a phone call, while calling upon one's interlocutors to revert to the niceties of a more epistolatory age. Added to this I was becoming increasingly phobic about using the phone at all - an occupational hazard of the self-employed. All sorts of ugly situations could be defused, it seemed to me, via the agency of keyboard and modem.
When people talk nowadays about 'information overload' and the way the internet has clogged up their lives, I'm inclined to that - to paraphrase Marshal MacLuhan - they are projecting their own message on to this essentially 'value null' medium. These are the same people who mindlessly surf the innumerable cable tv stations, or obsessively do Sudoko and Crosswords - their cooption of the internet into their psychic realm of point and click. I would wager these are the same types who find it impossible not to use their mobile phones to tell someone else where they are, or their satellite navigation system to get to the supermarket. It is they who have - as a self-fulfilling prophecy - dubbed the Blackberry the 'crackberry', and cannot forego from checking their email in-boxes every few seconds.
! do it again 
! he he i kinda feel that way still
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