The Computer and Us

The computer. Few if any modern inventions could define our world of today more precisely than this marriage of electronic software and hardware. And few areas in the scientific and tecnological evolution of human society, have elicited more comment, more sould-searching and more equivocation than this. But like the motor-car, which still has its many detractors, the computer is here to stay, for good or evil. Hopefully it is for the former, it all depends on how we use it. After all, we still have not learnt how best to live with the motor-car which is arguably much more capable of harming our environment than the computer and perhaps, although it may not seem so at present, less useful and revolutionary than the computer, not to mention its more powerful and all-pervasive younger sibling, the Internet. But, notwithstanding the indisputable significance of the Internet, which is still growing, I will be restricting my comments in this blog to the computer per se, the Internet will be the subject of a future blog. After all, it deserves a whole blog to itself!

I'm old enough to recall a time when the manual typewriter was the order of the day and the last word in office equipment, along with the xerox photocopier - and the only electrical device on my desk was the telephone! Then came the electric typewriter, which represented a modest leap forward, after which it was not long before the electronic typewriter arrived on the scene. The electronic typewriter often came fitted with a short narrow strip of LCD screen on which appeared the words that you typed, though as yet there was no way of making integrated corrections other than by using the correction track of a combined typing and correction ribbon, itself a great improvement on the hand-applied snopake/tippex correction fluid or correction paper strip. By now some large companies had set up so-called computer rooms where rows of grey cabinets whirred away with the sound of rotating spools of data tape which impressed by their sheer bulk and number than by their computing ability. It was not in fact until the arrival of the first batch of machines which ran on elaborated programs and had decent-sized text display screens that the modern-day computer was born in any real sense of the word. And with the computer it was recognised that some sort of printer was needed to produce hard copy. We were now in the 1990s and the home computer age had truly arrived, having grown out of the computer developed for business and industrial needs. The next few years would see constant improvement of the software and hardware that would turn these rudimentary electronic machines into powerful, flexible and ever more capable computers that would proliferate in the office environment as a multi-use tool.

My first computer was the humble Amstrad model which came packaged with a separate keyboard and printer. The software was basic, the monitor was small, and the printer, fitted with a daisy-wheel printing component, was about as noisy as the old golf-ball typewriter, as it too was based on the percussion principle. But it was a start and the price was reasonable for the time, which is why the Amstrad computer became so popular in its first years. Later on, as more capable computers came on stream and were made available at competitive prices, the Amstrad, which could not compete in terms of capability, began to lose ground and eventually disappeared. But it had introduced many thousands of people to the principle of the computer and now the market was ready for a whole host of different makes and models, sporting new and attractive refinements. As I began to lose patience with my noisy and very limited daisy-wheel printer and the equally limited software which ran it, I realised it was time to throw it out and acquire one of the new crop of computers running on Windows 98 and using the quiet ink-jet printers. I was ready for the next step up in the computer ladder.

Since then and several models on, the computer has become an integral part of my life, both for work and for leisure, as it has for millions and millions of people worldwide, and its appeal has of course been enormously boosted by the Internet. Indeed for many people who do not use the computer for work purposes, the Internet and all its trappings - e-mail, games, networking, social encounter sites, and other online applications - are the sole reason for its appeal and this has fuelled an exponential growth in its take-up, going into many millions of homes and being duplicated inside each home as each member of the household feels the need to have his own exclusive machine, often within a network and sharing a common signal from a device known as a router. The computer, whether a desktop or a laptop or indeed both, is a familiar piece of furniture in every household. Even the common television set has now been recruited to double up as a computer terminal!

The computer has truly come of age, going from being a purely practical and rather limited industrial machine to a powerful must-have multimedia device in every home, as numerous as the tv set and with much greater potential. It is not for nothing that the times we are now living in have been christened the Computer Age and this is just the beginning. Our lives now are influenced and shaped by the computer and our living habits are fast changing as a consequence of our changing relationship with this ever-more powerful and capable piece of machinery . There is hardly a field of human activity that has not been affected by the computer as it spreads its tentacles into every aspect of human existence. But this brings us on to the other aspect of computing, a veritable revolution in itself with unimaginable ramifications and implication - the Internet - and that is something I will be looking at in another post.

The Mobile Phone (cellphone) and Us

The mobile phone (or cellphone)... now that's a subject and a half! It is today's great totem and a very emotive issue. The mobile phone delights and enrages at the same time. Some people love it and others hate it. Some swear by it and others swear at it. Yet neither can live without it! Or can they?

Well, I am old enough to recall a time when there was no such thing as a mobile phone, when the only phones one had was the landline connected to a socket in the wall or the public phone in a telephone booth. When you were out and about, you were beyond contact unless you chose to use a public phone, whether in a street-located phone booth or in some other location, like a train station for instance. Otherwise, when you were out you were out. Now when you are out you are in, so to speak. You may be in a bank or post office queue, at the pharmacy, in the shopping mall, at the barber's, in a railway station, at the park, or even in a public convenience doing what comes naturally, but none of these is an adequate excuse for not answering the phone when it goes off (I say 'goes off' because few mobile phones nowadays actually ring - they usually start blasting away with some maddening tune or other). And of course every phone call must be answered on pain of failing to save the world if the call is left till later. All calls now are a matter of life and death and must be attended no matter where one is and with whom one is. You may be, say, in a restaurant chatting with a friend, but that won't stop you from breaking off your chat to answer a call that may drag on and on whilst your companion patiently waits for you to come off the blasted phone and give them some attention!

But of course the mobile phone has long ceased to be just a phone... it's become a watch, a calendar, a camera, a calculator, a messaging device, a computer, a music player, a games console, ... and I understand it has also been used as a trigger to detonate a terrorist bomb! It is our constant companion and our link with friends and family. It is also the West's answer to worry beads... now we can fiddle around with our phone when we want to kill time. In short, it is truly a most versatile gadget and comparable to the motor car and the computer in terms of its coverage and utility. The cellphone is one of the twentieth century's greatest success stories and it is still going from strength to strength. And there is already at least one generation of people who neither know nor can conceive of any other world than one with the mobile phone. In the relatively short time that the mobile phone has been with us it has already shaped and coloured our world to such an extent that our way of living has been left changed forever and many of us seem to organise our lives around the mobile phone!

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And of course every new and good thing gives rise to new problems and undesirable consequences. In the case of the mobile phone, it has become so intrusive in our lives that our privacy has been seriously curtailed. As already touched upon above, we can no longer plead unavailability on the grounds that we were out when a call came. After all, is a mobile phone not portable?* And if we protest that we forgot our phone at home, we are regarded as simply lying or as having done it deliberately to avoid calls. We have left ourselves with very little room for manoevre.

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Another problem stems from the very popularity of the mobile phone. With many millions of phones in circulation and with constant upgrades, millions of mobile phones are discarded in the course of a year. All have to be treated and disposed of in some manner or other, whether to be destroyed or recycled. Some are just dumped or binned. But all will end up somewhere and in some form.

The other principal problem created by the widespread use of the mobile phone is the common tendency to use it even when out driving on the public highway. We've all seen drivers with one hand to their ear, holding up their phone, chatting away with a caller, leaving them with just one hand to drive the car. What's more serious than that is the divided concentration which necessarily occurs when a driver has also to conduct a phone conversation as well as drive. This inevitably results in reduced alertness, slower reactions, less accurate driving, and consequently in an increased risk of accident on the road, with all the concomitant dangers of that. And this goes on even though it may be illegal and therefore punishable by law.

Finally, there can be no doubt that a great many people are literally addicted to their mobile phone. It has to be with them every waking moment of their day and in some cases by their bedside when they are asleep. They are constantly using it (even when there's no real need for it), playing with it, fiddling with it and pawing it, presumably to derive comfort and security from it. It has become a sort of mascot, talisman or magic wand for them. This being so, one can imagine the effect on them should they mislay or even lose their trusty telecommunications friend. It is a state not far removed from utter despair and the loss of the will to live!

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And now the inevitable question: Do you recognise yourself in the above description? Are you wedded to your mobile phone? Are you afflicted by a condition known as "cellphonitis" whereby your phone has almost turned into a life support machine for you? Is the company of your cellphone more important to you than the company of human beings? Are you in a state of complete cellphone dependency? Do you break out into a cold sweat at the very idea of losing your phone? Is your worst nightmare the possibility of forgetting your mobile phone at home and being caught out and about without it? If the answer to one or more of these questions is 'yes', then your relationship with your phone is an unhealthy one and you should seek help. Find a good psychiatrist and get treated for cellphonitis!

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* Strictly speaking, a mobile phone is not 'mobile', this is a misnomer, it is 'portable', and this is what it was called when it first came out. A car or a train, for example, is mobile, a phone has to be carried and so is not mobile in the true sense of this word.

At my desk

That's me in the picture at my desk, working on my computer, and pausing to look out of the window in front of me. Well, not quite. I'm not that young, nor that slim, nor that cute... except in my mind, of course...hehhe... And when I was the same age as the youth in the picture there was no such thing as a desktop or laptop computer, or many other things, come to that. But I do pause from time to time from my work at my computer to look out of the window ahead of me. That much is true. Though i don't stuff my hands in my pockets!

This morning when I paused from my work to look out of my study window it was grey and gloomy outside, and I knew it was cold too, the scattered patches of frost testified to that. But it was also snowing. A light sprinkling of snowflakes that were falling sideways blown by the breeze. But it didn’t last very long. In fact it wasn't really proper snow, it was more like sleet. In less than an hour it had come to an end and there was just a light dusting here and there which I knew was not going to be there for long. And by late afternoon there was no evidence that it had been there. The grey sky was still there though. And the wind. And the cold.

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It's on dark days like this that I often find myself daydreaming. Funnily enough I seldom daydream when the weather is fine and the sun is out - that's a sure turnoff. But when it's dull and dreary like today or, even better, when it's raining or sleeting or snowing, my mind begins to wander as I stare out of the window at the wintry scene outside. There's nothing like grey and grim weather to get the creative juices welling up, assuming one has any, of course. So here I sit at my desk on just such a day and waiting for inspiration to flow into me and creativity to flow out... I only hope it won't be a long wait!

The above pic was taken in a more clement season some while back and gives a more faithful image of the view from my study-cum-office window. Below is the garden and beyond that is a park. Not a bad view, eh? It has a calming effect on me and helps me work. It also helps me write this blog when I can spare a moment. It is my window on the world, you might say.