All a-Twitter over the impact of new technology

Published on Saturday 15 August 2009 20:13

We're fascinated but prone to giggly incomprehension

DO YOU feel a tremulous sense of excitement when you send a text to tell your mum you'll be late for tea? Or feel as though you're entering a whole new realm of human experience, like Keats on first opening Chapman's Homer, when you set the microwave to full to defrost the lasagne?

I thought not. Though if you did answer yes to both the questions above then perhaps I can interest you in a Hibs season ticket. Anyone who can thrill to the sort of experiences the rest of us regard as going through the motions will have the time of their lives at Easter Road.

For most of us, the immense gains technology has generated in our lifetime soon become taken for granted. Texting, once a feature of mobile phones only employed by nimble-fingered teens, has become entirely mainstream. Microwaves, once banned from the family house by my mother on the basis they would kill the family meal, are now as ubiquitous as, well as a Sky dish or broadband connection.

And yet each of these innovations, like all technological breakthroughs, goes through a curious cycle before it becomes an accepted part of the domestic furniture. First there's fascination, then wariness or even fear, then enthusiastic, infatuated embrace, then, after a period of accepting various foibles, eventually we settle down to life together. The course of true love rarely runs smooth, and neither does our relationship with new technology, but sooner or later we learn to get along. Sat-navs, BlackBerries, digital watches, all once objects of awed fascination and then, without our quite knowing when the precise moment arose, natural parts of our life.

But there are some technologies we're still tongue-tied in the face of. Unsure of our exact status. Take Twitter, for example. We're still in the holiday romance stage of our relationship with this networking technology. Fascinated, growing absorbed by it, but still prone to giggly incomprehension.

When David Cameron, for example, made a verbal slip when referring to Twitter in one interview the reaction was reminiscent of a gaggle of teenagers hearing about the first time one of their number had been French kissed – all oohs, aahs and a contrived sense of shock. And this week's coverage of the Prime Minister's initial fumbling foray into Tweeting betrays exactly the same adolescent nudge-nudge quality. Oh look, it's his first time!

It won't be long, of course, before Twitter has the same status in all our lives as e-mail: ubiquitous, handy, avoided by some as a matter of austere choice, embraced by many more as just another way of keeping in touch.

It will be almost impossible to know when we reach the tipping point at which Twitter becomes truly mainstream. But there are two waystations it will pass en route.

The first is when it becomes subject to a moral panic. The social networking sites Facebook and MySpace were caught up in just such a furore a fortnight ago when the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, took them to task for encouraging transient acquaintance in place of the deep, enduring friendships which give all our lives meaning. The Archbishop has a point when he emphasises the importance of quality, not quantity, in relationships but it seems a bit rough to pin the blame for the erosion of social capital we've all noticed occurring over the last 40 years on two internet sites. Whether or not the Archbishop was right to make his point in the way he did, there is one aspect of his intervention which was not in doubt. By fingering these two sites in the way he did, he stood in the long line of experts, dating back to those who feared the effect on our physical and moral health of railway travel, who have greeted every technological breakthrough with foreboding.

The second rite of passage any new technology has to go through is baptism by novel, or adoption by scriptwriter. You can tell a technology is on its way to permanence in our lives when it becomes a crucial plot feature in a contemporary thriller or crime series. The decision by Robert Harris to make a car's sat-nav a central clue to his 2007 novel The Ghost was a far clearer sign than any set of sales figures from Halfords that this technology, like its owners, had almost arrived.

So, the moment when a learned divine pronounces on the malign tendency of Twitter to inflame lustful feelings in the young, and the hour when the Taggart team discover that the Stobhill Strangler gives away his victim's locations with tell-tale Tweets, is the time you can be sure it's safe to start Tweeting yourself.

Of course, some of us will never Tweet, poke a friend on Facebook, venture into the blogosphere or have a place on MySpace we can truly call our own. There are always refuseniks who, when the world and his wife are embracing new technology, prefer to remain technically celibate.

And there is a certain austere dignity in holding oneself aloof, monk-like, far from the texting crowd. Meet someone these days without a mobile phone and he or she seems not so much out of touch as curiously calm and centred, living at a pace they choose, not one set for them by others.

Most of us, however, can no more reject the temptations of technologies that bring us all together than we can pledge ourselves to lifelong abstinence from any whiff of physical intimacy.

And we should just accept it's natural for the majority of us to want the convenience and closeness of new ways of networking, without feeling there's anything untoward about it. Let's face it, these days, given all the pressures of work which separate us from those we love, a healthy text life is what keeps relationships together.