Endless prattle, but I love this wired world
Last updated at 16:25 15 August 2004
The other day, I was attempting to explain to my totally bemused teenagers what used to happen in prehistoric times.
"Do you remember when sometimes friends were late and you had to wait for them," I said, "not knowing where they were, or what time they would turn up?"
Yes, in the mists of time before the mobile phone, occasionally people would meet up and even find each other at airports.
With constant communication, it's hard to imagine now that this ever happened, but it did. Indeed, we used to be able to go to supermarkets and video shops and pick out the wrong movie or pasta sauce because we could not instantaneously communicate with our spouses.
Somehow, though, the world still went round.
Yes, the revolution has not only been televised, but also digitised, e-mailed and turned into a ring-tone you can download for free.
I, for one, am glad to live in a wired world where my children expect to communicate wherever they are.
When my eldest went off to Bolivia, I couldn't have her tagged. But she had a mobile phone, which is the contemporary equivalent. Not that she needed it, the place is full of internet cafes.
This is the point at which it is obligatory to bemoan the decline in letter writing, but let's be honest: how many of us wrote literary epistles before there was e-mail?
When I was travelling, I wrote to my mum a few times and it was mostly lies, otherwise she would have worried about me - with good reason.
But yes, of course I can get nostalgic for the days when my address was Poste Restante, Srinagar, Kashmir.
And no, I don't share the text etiquette of my kids and am amazed, like everyone over 40, at what complete strangers reveal to each other on the bus by shouting into their mobiles. What was once private, what you did last night and who you did it with, is now shrieked out loud as if it was a public service announcement.
But like so many others, having embraced the useful parts of new technology, I can't be without them.
There is a kind of democracy of consumer choice, with broadband, digital and mobile services, which is why the traditional providers of media and telecom services with fixed landlines and terrestrial TV are suffering.
A new Ofcom survey shows that more revenue is coming from TV subscriptions than advertising and that more money is being made from mobiles and internet access than from old-style fixed calls.
Now more than half of us use the internet regularly and there are many, often those already in the media, who bemoan the endless prattle produced by the new communications technology.
They worry that there are now far too many ordinary folk communicating with each other but communicating nothing of great import.
Some would prefer to go back to the time when information and dialogue was the province of the elite.
But, when Ofcom says we are a nation addicted to consuming and sharing information, isn't that a good thing? Now that we all have Too Much Information about each other and about the world, what we really need is to hone our abilities to analyse and order all this information.
In a world of constant chatter, where who is on the cover of Heat magazine sits alongside what is happening in Najaf, decoding the babble not only entertains us but is also what will ultimately protect us.
This is called intelligence, and the 21st Century will belong to those of us who are as unafraid of it as they are of the new technology.
