Monday 17th January 2011

What would life be like without t'interweb?
Or emails, or mobile phones?

I remember once when my son asked me if I used to watch CBBC when I was a little boy and couldn't understand it when I told him that when I was a little boy there were only three channels and that I could remember when Channel 4 and Channel Five started. He then asked me if I watched DVDs if there wasn't much on television, as we only had three channels.

So just imagine if we all woke up tomorrow and t'interweb was gone.
No sign of it what-so-ever. What would all the farcebookers do? Would they go into cold turkey? Just think of all the information that is available to us at a few touches of a button. All of it would be alot harder to access and we may have to do stuff like visit libraries and read things called books. I wonder how many people under the age of sixteen have never been in a library? I used to go in the one in my town all the time.

Most libraries lend out CDs and DVDs now, but I still remember the good old vinyl record. My brother used to have a huge collection of records: albums, 12" singles and 7" singles. He had picture discs and even some shaped discs. One I remember well was Toto's 'Africa' which was in the shape of Africa. He also had a load of ELO records, all different colours and all really bright.

Do you know anyone who does not have a mobile phone?
Everyone I know has one, with the exception of my youngest two children but they are only seven and five years old so they are a little young, but virtually everyone else has one. My parents, both in their 70's, have one each, my Dad recommended the Samsung Galaxy S to me, and my Mum sends me texts and infuriates me by writing them in 'text speak'. "RU cuming 2moz?" is an example, "You're 73 years old, you know how to write properly" would be my reply.
I can remember when not so many people had mobile phones. I can remember working on a construction site and having to queue to use 'the site phone' that would be located in a little room somewhere so you could make your daily call to the office. Or if the office rang you, you would have to trudge across the site to get to the phone, only to find that they had got fed up waiting and had hung up.
These days, if you don't answer your mobile phone immediately, or return the call straight away, the caller will just ring again, and again if necessary, and be really annoyed with you for not answering promtly, asking where the hell you were, why didn't you answer, have they done something to upset you, are you ignoring them etc etc.

Emails are similar. People used to write letters of faxes. People used to expect to have to wait for a reply. But not these days, oh no, not any more. If you get an email you feel obliged to, and you are expected to reply immediately. It's even worse if you can get emails on your phone.You can't get away from the bloody things. Well you can if you switch them off, but you daren't do that in case you miss something.

They say the world is getting smaller, well it aint, we are just getting closer.............