The debate about whether Tony Abbott should or should not have been able to answer questions about peak internet speeds probably divides Australians into two classes: the digerati and the rest.
Most Australians are hooked up to the web now, and the unconnected are a dwindling band of Luddites, plus those who believe they’re too old to learn computers, or too poor to pay for access.
But among those who do have internet access, there’s a wide spectrum of different experiences.
It’s too easy for someone like me, who spends much of every day surfing the net, to forget that most Australians have neither the time nor the inclination to do the same.
I’m not denying for a second that decisions about our internet infrastructure are absolutely central to our social and economic future.
But many in the public have not yet caught up with the changes that are almost certainly going to require voracious quantities of internet capacity – they don’t necessarily ‘get it’in the way that the tech-heads and the Twitterati do. And then there are the total hold-outs.
What made me think about all this was an anonymous letter I received in the post, written in pencil of lined paper.
Unlike some of the missives I receive, it was in a neat hand, every word was perfectly spelled, and it was grammatically correct.
And while the disgust with the modern world it expressed was fairly extreme, it did make me read to the end.
Apologists for TECHNONEWNESS who talk about PROGRESS always lead me towards a gross leaning to pulp their little plastic, yacking GIMMICKS into a rough paste the consistency of oatmeal and make them force it down their throats while they are subjected to 3 1/2 hours of old Mouseketeer programs. Science and technology have done less than nothing for human “PROGRESS”, except make our lives NOISER, FASTER, STUPIDER, GREEDIER, SILLIER, UGLIER, NASTIER and MORE DESTRUCTIVE in every sense of the word.
The two worst things ever invented, the TELEPHONE and the AUTOMOBILE, set the scene 100 years ago, and since then we have gone from bad to worse. The spectacle of an entire city block of pedestrians yakking into their plastic Jiminy Crickets about where they are now, where they might be in ten minutes, where they were last night, where they might be next Tuesday, and whether or not the dog food is on top of the fridge or out in the woodshed, fills me with a leaden horror that has banned me from any city precinct for the last seven and a half years.
The tragic irony of these ghastly implements, despite what Technogeeks like Stephen Fry assert, is that they are the most effective impediments to communication that has yet been devised.
It is absolutely inevitable, no matter where you are, or who it is you might be trying to talk to, the moment you open your mouth one of these cursed contraptions will start ringing in your ears, or the phone on the wall will join in as well, and of course they’ve both got to be loud enough to overload the equally inevitable squalling television set in the next room, or the car radio blaring in the car park outside, the droning wail of the ride-on lawnmower on the other side of the road, or the helicopter thundering overhead on its way to poison the marshlands.
I have totally abandoned all pretence at verbal communication except to mutter “Hello!” or “Thank You” or “That one over there, please”, and hightail it out of all proximity to my fellow human beings, whomI now regard as nothing more than two-legged appendages to the MAW of the Machine Age, and the ruthless corporate gangsters who are making millions out of our pathological obsession with gadgets..
When I hear that 100,000 people queued up OVERNIGHT so that they could get first choice of the latest Japanese video game, I know we are on the way out. And HIGH TIME TOO.
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