Pokey-Screens Über Alles

Hi everybody! That’s how I start it, good enough, no? So it’s been a long and arid week and a bit since my last post and I’ve saved up enough excuses to fill an infirmary for sick and wounded excuses. Sadly, none of these are good enough so you’ll have to settle for the old favourite ‘I just couldn’t be arsed’. Which is largely the truth.

That’s not to say my life has been a barren void since then. I’ve actually taken one more step towards completion. Now that I have my brand new not-an-iPhone-phone, I’m nearly there; I’m almost human, just like you.

The temptation to go off on a semi-sarcastic rant about the superficiality of technological trinkets is almost too great but we both know that that would make me a filthy hypocrite, a self-loathing one, maybe, but a hypocrite nonetheless.

So I’m not going to do that today. You’ve already heard my disdain-for-modernity bit so it’s time to spice things up with my new line – Isn’t the future awesome!?

We’ve made it, friends. Here we are in the 21st century and it’s just like they promised it would be, only better. Granted, they haven’t delivered on the flying cars (yet) or teleportation or lifelike robotic sex dolls, but neither have we descended into that futuristic dystopia about which we have been warned time and again.

The world is by no means perfect but there are no thought police, no genetic guinea-pigs, no palm-implanted gemstones telling us when we’ve lived just the right number of years. There are quite a few spots of Hell on the planet but I don’t live there, I’m one of the lucky ones and if you’re reading this, then so are you.

Join hands with me and sing a song about how grateful we are.

They said we’d have hover-boards and telepathic transducers by now, to say nothing of the huge space stations orbiting Alpha Centauri, but who predicted Shazam? Where are the smart phones in all the pages of Arthur C. Clarke? I’ll tell you where – they’re in his bin. Dream gadgets that can do anything you want them to were too crazy even for him.

But there it is, on my desk in front of me, its please-charge-me light flashing away, trying to get my attention. Is it a phone? Is it a camera? Is it a Dictaphone? Is it an encyclopaedia? Is it a handheld gaming device? Is it the source of all joy? The answer to these questions is yes, yes, oh god yes, a thousand times yes!

Some of you might call me shallow. I bet you’re rolling your eyes with disgust right now that I could sell my principles and join the hordes of techno-zombies jabbing at a tiny screen for all eternity. It’s okay to be jealous, as long as you remember that you’re only hurting yourself.

Of course, there are others amongst you who will no doubt remind me of my own former misgivings surrounding pokey-screen culture. To you, I say this – where is your evidence? Pokey-screens are a gift from God and I would never blaspheme in such a way, how could I? Pokey-screens do everything and if there’s anything it doesn’t do, there’s probably an app for that. Pokey-screens rule, Pokey-screens über alles. Praise to the pokey-screens! Glory be to pokey-screens!

I think that’s enough of that.

If There Is a Collective Unconscious, Then the Internet Is Where It Lives.

I’ve been absent for a while and the only excuse I have is my pathetic addiction to facts. Don’t get me wrong, in the last week, I’ve sat down to write something, on average, four times a day but the sequence of events is always the same. I’ll open up the laptop, waggle the screen around until it stops flickering before losing my mind with impatience and plugging in an external monitor (some users of Fujitsu Siemens Amilo series will be familiar with this highly irritating defect).

When I finally get to the point were I can see what I’m doing, I start the first sentence only to realise that I don’t know what I’m going to write. So I open Internet Explorer with the honest intention of finding a news report or a movie trailer or anything at all really, so long as I can create a cluster bomb of my collected discoveries for you, dear reader, to enjoy.

The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that I’ve turned into some kind of infomaniac, tirelessly pursuing knowledge only to discover that knowledge is a wholly elusive creature, especially when you’re trying to find it on the internet.

You’ll know that, of course, because here you are, on the internet, faced with the evidence. That’s right, this blog is the internet on a small scale. It’s an unloved mongrel of opinion and filler and it’s only after digging through the whole thing that you actually learn anything.

And what do you learn?

I’ll tell you what - you learn that your time would have been better spent reading a book.

Naturally, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the internet itself. This is a matter of self discipline and my lack thereof. Users of the human brain MKI will be familiar with this highly irritating defect.

If you’ve read Generation X by Douglas Coupland, you’ll be aware of a condition known as Option Paralysis. It’s a simple concept - imagine it’s 1989 and you’re in a village shop looking for biscuits for the tea. Modernity hasn’t really spread this far yet and you have a choice between only Rich Tea or Digestives. On top of that, it’s four-thirty and the shop will close in a half and hour. It’s a bleak old premise, I know, but on the plus-side, you’ll walk out the door of said shop in under five minutes with a packet of biscuits and before long, you’ll be dunking them in your tea and having the time of your life.

Now flash forward to the year of our Lord 2010. You’re in the biscuit aisle of some 24 hour super-Tesco. You have all day, and tomorrow as well, to look through a universe of biscuits in all manner of colours and flavours, different grades of chocolateyness, encrusted with whatever nut, raisin or toffee-chunk takes your fancy, wrapped up in fancy packaging, shouting ’pick me, pick me, don’t look at the others, it is I who shall be the perfect accompaniment for your brew…’.

After ten minutes‘ trying to decide, you start to get a little impatient. Another twenty minutes pass and you’re reduced to a quivering wreck with still no biscuits in your hand.

Just to keep sane, you convince yourself that you have the world of biscuits all worked out before realising that this aisle continues around the corner into another aisle twice the size of the one you’ve just been soaking with tears of desperation.

The next morning, the biscuit aisle is cordoned off by the authorities because your shrivelled corpse is scaring the children and someone has to mop up all four of your humours before someone slips.

And your tea has gone cold.

This, dear friends, is Option Paralysis. When faced with an infinitude of choice, the tendency is for the brain to lock down, leaving the subject to vibrate, on the spot, between all possibilities, never to make a decision at all.

If you compare option paralysis to AIDS, then surfing the internet would be akin to swan-diving into a swimming pool filled with used needles. The internet contains virtually everything that humankind has thus-far thought about and much more besides.

If there is a collective unconscious, then the internet is where it lives.

Here, you can find anything you like - howler monkeys, solar flares, all-night taxidermists, bowler hats, candy floss - you name it, it’s all there.

So, with an ocean of choice such as that, is it really any wonder that I haven’t been able to decide what to write about? I hope my argument convinces you more than it does me. Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, I’m off to Tesco to buy some biscuits. I may be some time…