In bed with cultural dissonance

In my 63-year lifetime so far, there’s been major technological advancement. It’s been massive. Monumental. Unprecedented, too. Arguably the era of greatest and fastest tech advancement ever. When I was a nipper no-one would’ve believed that in 2010 I’d be able to wake up, turn on a portable electronic device smaller than a sardine tin, and within 10 seconds be reading something called email, and be linked to the world by something called the internet. But yesterday I did exactly this. And via the internet I read an item about telegrams [1]. This week is Back to Morse Week [2] – the 20th – marking the completion in 1872 of the 3,200 km Overland Telegraph Line between Adelaide and Darwin [3]. To celebrate, this week Darwin residents can send free telegrams nation-wide. Do you remember telegrams? They were used to send good and bad news; congratulations and commiserations. Best Men read them at weddings. And the Queen sent them to her centenarian subjects. The world’s first telegram was in 1844 – in the USA. Australia’s first one was in 1854, and the last one was in 1993 [4]. Technologically speaking, 1993 seems like an eon ago. (I didn’t send, or receive, my first email until 1998.) I don’t know if the current tech flourish’s increased people’s happiness. It’s an interesting question. But that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, stop us marvelling at it. Or suffering cultural dissonance [5] when one lies in bed surfing the net on one’s iPod, reading of telegrams. Ho hum.

farmdoc's blog post number 582

A mere 11 days after the launch of Alzheimer’s: a Love Story, books are very much on my mind. Two days post launch, Sweetheart Vivienne and I visited our friend Irene who’d been given an Amazon Kindle for her recent birthday. I’d heard and read of the Kindle, but I’d never seen let alone used one. So I was intrigued when Irene started it up and let us play with it. She’d downloaded one book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, if you’re curious). New things are hard to adapt to, especially for an old guy like me. I think I absorb stories and information better when I read from paper I hold in my hands – be it a book or a pile of A4 pages. Recently I volunteered to read a draft manuscript novel written by Sweetheart Vivienne’s writing colleague, and our friend, Jane. As I expected, I received it as a Microsoft Word file attached to an email. Yesterday I read half of it. It felt oh so strange reading it on my computer screen. I longed to hold a paper version in my hands, to feel the pages, to smell them, to hear their sound as I leafed through them. Michael Dell and Bill Gates denied me that privilege this time. But after Jane’s book’s published, as I think and hope it will be, I’ll do so then. But will I ever get used to books in electronic form? Who knows? As I wrote here, I love the smell of books and bookshops. And as I wrote yesterday, the internet was once anathema to me, but now it’s second nature. Time will tell.

farmdoc's blog post number 581

I think it was in the mid 1990s. And at someone’s wedding. I can’t recall whose – but it matters not. The discussion was about the (then nascent) internet. And I swore I’d never be an internet user. Never, ever. Oh how the worm’s turned. It began to turn in 1998: when Sweetheart Vivienne and I were on our tandem ride in Britain, we sent periodic group email bulletins to relatives and friends. And it grew from there. Nowadays the internet’s an integral part of my life. I even dictate my medical reports on a digital dictaphone and send the sound files to my typist as email attachments. A few years ago my internet usage (and dependence but not, I hope, addiction) ratcheted up when broadband (i.e. ADSL) came to Mole Creek. In comparison, dial-up connections were so primitive. But better than nothing. Anyway, as I wrote yesterday, I’ve had no internet connection since last Friday morning. In a 5:45 a.m. lightning strike, Mother Nature flexed her muscles. I can’t see where the lightning struck, but it tripped my electrical circuit breaker. The lost ADSL connection’s the only damage I’ve discovered so far. I feel lost without it. Isolated. Bereft. I keep humming Joni Mitchell’s line: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. Telstra, bless its corporate heart, is sending a technician to look at the problem on Tuesday morning. I don’t know if he’ll come on Tuesday, or if he’ll fix the problem then. Here’s hoping. I’ll keep you posted. Literally.