I’m a technophobe in every sense of the word. I’m afraid of technology, as well as techno. Any musical form that can vibrate through your chest causing arrhythmia and tinnitus to boot, I find deeply suspect. Music is supposed to give you joy, not a life-effecting medical condition. Then again, if there’s no doctor in the house and some schmuck passes out, just scream for a DJ, stat! It could probably shock the poor bastard back to life as good as any defibrillator. “Give me a Grant Smilie mix at 160 BPMs. CLEAR!”
I thought technology was supposed to make life easier, to streamline it, and give you more time for the important things in life, not create a time vortex akin to the Tardis-like properties of my new handbag. How devotees of MySpace manage to fit any other work/leisure activity into their schedules is beyond me – it’s a full time job in itself. There are profiles to update, other people’s friends to stalk, and endless blogs to churn out. God forbid that a day should pass without every friend and your entire extended network knowing your every thought and movement (bowel, or otherwise).
Before you call me a hypocrite, yes I do have a MySpace thingy, but only because someone got it for me and bullied me into it. And only after I’d had a complete email tantrum about not being able to get the stuff to upload properly. And just when that was sorted, I had friend requests to accept or deny. Now I’m a nice person and I don’t wanna diss anyone, but when a 49 year old guy from NZ asks to be your friend, and you look at his profile only to see that all his other “friends” seem to be scantily clad, buxom blondes with names like Misty and Cherie, you kind of wonder whether the friendship’s really gonna go anywhere, or how he even stumbled upon you (and your non scantily clad photo) in the first place.
Where will it all stop? Will it get to the point where we don’t sustain any friendships in person, in the real world? Where we have friends known only to us by their graphic icons and suitably impressive sounding posts? “You caught up with a friend for coffee?” someone will ask incredulously. Clearly, actually leaving the house to talk to someone is just so 90s. Or perhaps you’ll get a nasty shock one day when you find out that you haven’t actually formed a special connection with the real David Hasselhoff, and that consequently, you will not be joining him on his tour of Europe this northern Summer, complete with 5 Star accommodation and partying with the stars on P. Diddy’s yacht off the coast of St Tropez.
It’s all too much for me. I can’t help the way I am. I’m Australian Technophobian, half technophobe, on my mother’s side. My mum used to blame her bad eyesight for her lack of nous with all things technical. “I can’t see the buttons!” being the most common excuse. While that’s certainly true now, it didn’t really wash 15 years ago. I remember the day I once phoned her because I hadn’t set my video to catch the last episode of Melrose Place. Quel disastre. Talking her through it was like talking a hapless passenger through landing a plane because the pilot has had a heart attack and the flight attendant’s been knocked unconscious by her renegade drink trolley during some unscheduled turbulence. “Can you see a red dotty circle now? And does the glowing number in the right corner say 10? It does?” Touchdown.
And recently on holiday, I stayed in an apartment that had an “entertainment system”. Not just a DVD or stereo, no my friends, a veritable, omnipotent system for your entertainment pleasure, if you can get the damn thing to work that is. I swear it was harder to negotiate than an attempted docking at the International Space Station, with a complex program of different remotes and buttons to be pressed in a specific order and for varying lengths of time, while the planets aligned and a butterfly flapped its wings in Japan. All this just to make the LCD screen lower at the correct time, if indeed, at all.
As Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front might have uttered: “What has technology ever done for us?!” Well, apart from having a choice of 40,000 songs on your iPod, or paying your bills instantly over the Net, or being contactable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… Actually, to hell with that. I stand by my earlier comment. Technology bites. Anyway, I really must be going. I have to go post my first MySpace blog.
For more about this comic go to Vanessa Bennett