UPFRONT:LAST WEEK, MY FRIEND Mark joined a dinner party in my kitchen. He cracked a beer while I opened the wine, greeted the guests as they arrived, and was, in his wise-cracking Mark fashion, the life and soul of the party. Except he managed all of this without leaving his house in Brooklyn. Yes, Brooklyn, New York. Ha!
Gobsmacked? Probably not. Most of you are by now familiar with Skype and video chats and the like, and know that such things as Mark O’Neill being in my kitchen in Stoneybatter while simultaneously in his house in Park Slope are par for the course these days.
But this – my far-flung friend chatting to me through my laptop perched on top of the bread bin – is the kind of thing that still gives me goosebumps. My astonishment at The Things Technology Can Do never ceases to amaze, well, everybody else. If I weren’t so practised at disguising my delight, I would be walking all day with my gob swung open at the futuristic phenomena that are so quickly being subsumed into daily life.
Not only can my friend talk to me live through my computer, but telephones can take photographs, cars can give you driving directions, and most of my music collection is miraculously packed into a flat white device that weighs less than a mix tape.
And don’t even get me started on the iPhone or I’ll pass out altogether. There I was the other day, in that same Stoneybatter kitchen, (’swhere it all happens, folks) when a song came over the airwaves that I recognised but couldn’t place. So my iPhone-toting friend offers to Shazam it. This involves holding her telephone up to the radio so that the phone can listen to the song being played and identify it. I’m serious, this is actually what happened. The telephone and the radio did some crazy voodoo ones-and-zeros thing, and next thing you know, there was the song’s title on her iPhone. Shazam!
That’s the kind of technology that is so close to magic, it’d put Paul Daniels out of a job. Let’s face it, pulling a rabbit from a hat isn’t nearly as impressive as being able to identify a bird by putting your phone up to its beak as it chirps (thank you, iBird). It makes you wonder why they can’t invent an iNamerememberer, where you get instant name recall just by positioning your phone next to that vaguely familiar face you can’t put a name to.
So yes, technology is not quite perfect yet, but it is still my friend, and I love it dearly. Except when my so-called friend dumps me without a word of warning, packs it in, ships out and leaves me to the wolves. Git.
Let me explain. Not long ago, a freak accident in a local drinking establishment resulted in a tiny crack in my mobile phone screen, which grew until it rendered the phone entirely useless. Unfazed, I resorted to Skype for my phone calls. Until the unthinkable – frankly it’s barely typable – happened, and my computer, after a half-hour presentation of the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, gave up the ghost as well.
No mobile and no computer! I was cut adrift from the world of – well, the world, really. No e-mail. No Facebook. No text messaging. No phone calls. No life, you might conclude.
Well, you might. And you wouldn’t be far wrong, at least as far as my first few technology-free hours went. Arranging to meet anyone without a mobile phone was out of the question, given the impossibility of regularly updating them on my progress to the meeting point, and their inability to inform me of their decision to change said meeting point at the last minute. A little like phantom limb syndrome, I swore I could feel a vibration in my pocket where my trusty mobile used to rest.
But this was nothing compared to life sans computer. Without wishing to overstate things, life without e-mail is like being locked into a small, dark room while a wild and glorious party takes place just outside the door. I was inconsolable, wandering about the house in a daze, my fingers making involuntary tip-tapping motions on the table edge.
But get this: after a day or so spent rushing passers-by carrying mobile phones and pressing my grubby face to the windows of internet cafes, things changed. The twitching subsided, and I no longer heard ringtones in my head.
This whole technology-free life seemed suddenly simpler, like in ye olde days when people passed the time of day and read books and really talkedto each other. Things, rather surprisingly, did not fall apart. Nor, even more surprisingly, did I.
Granted, I had my computer fixed within three days, and a new phone in half that time: I haven’t entirely lost my mind, for God’s sake. But there was a moment there, a lull – when I couldn’t answer e-mails or send text messages, or update Facebook or blog – that was strangely, unnervingly pleasing. Liberating even.
Granted, it meant dinner parties were confined to people living within a five-mile radius, more or less, all of whom actually had to be fed in the process. Which makes me wonder how long we’ll have to wait before we can feed people through Skype . . . See, that’s the kind of magical thinking that sends the temporarily liberated luddite slinking back to its little dark room. Me, I’m enjoying the party again.