Stephen McGinty: Not a resolution, more a revolution

Coveting the iPad is enough to prod a Luddite to make a vow to bite the Apple and other high-tech nibbles Picture: AP

What is it about New Year that inspires change, or, to be more precise, the thought that change is necessary? If it's the deep desire to answer the call of our conscience and redress evident faults or unlock untapped potential, then men and women have been struggling with this for millennia. Didn't Penelope, the abandoned wife of Odysseus, choose the New Year to abandon hope and embark on a search for a second husband?

The history of the New Year resolution is murky and confused, but some claim the practice has antecedents in ancient Babylon, where an annual ritual of contrition was carried out by the king, who had his cheeks slapped and ears pulled as a punishment for the misdeeds of the past year. A cuneiform tablet dated to this time reads: "They shall speak the recitations," which may, or then again may not, be the distant relation of the resolution. The most popular resolution among the early Babylonians, who celebrated the New Year in spring, was, according to academics, to return borrowed farm equipment.

The Romans, meanwhile, invented 1 January in 153 BC, when they rearranged the calendar and chose the mythical King Janus, whose twin faces allowed him to look back on the old and forward to the new, to launch the year. The Romans considered this a month to take stock of their lives.

By the late 18th century, a disillusionment with the resolution had clearly set in. "The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorise civil and harmless lies," intoned Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, to his son. "People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel." William Hazlitt, the Victorian essayist, explained: "The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation."

Perhaps but I trust Mr Hazlitt will indulge me while I lay out my failings and why 2011 is the year they must be addressed. It is illustrated best by a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in which an old lady stared in stark terror at the remote control of a new flat-screen TV. The captions beneath the myriad of buttons, instead of reading, oh I don't know, "mute" or "Teletext".(I can't believe I typed that, this is clear proof of the problem: my technophobia. When was the last time anyone checked Teletext? I never checked Teletext, too frightened that if I stepped off the safe straight path of the basic channels I would never get them back and become lost in a world of slowly updating pixilated clouds and weather reports.) Anyway, back to the cartoon. We see the old lady's fear stamped on the buttons which read: "missile launch", "electrocution" and "self destruct". That's me. I'm that old lady, fearful of pressing the wrong button and blowing up the TV or computer or mobile phone.

PD James, the 90-year-old crime writer, spoke of being "frightened" by the pace of technological change and I identified with every word. And what is the cause of fear? Yes, ignorance. Because I don't understand how gadgets work I'm worried about breaking them, but this state of affairs can go on no longer. In the space age year of 2011, I'm determined to become au fait with new technology. It's my clear resolution, by this time next year, I'd like to be able to report on the successful completion of my mission.

But where to begin? The problem is for years I took a stubborn pride in my Luddite ways. I think it began with the family's first video. I could work that one. I could set the timer and even record programmes. I was surfing a wave of technological change. Then they upgraded in 1986 and I fell off and have been in the water ever since. I never bothered to learn. Those were the days of long-play video tapes, so if I wanted to record a late night film you put in an eight hour tape, pressed record and hoped it would last long enough to reach the end. Pathetic. Computers were little more than glorified typewriters. When mobile phones introduced texting, I didn't, well, couldn't text. The nadir of my Luddism was reached late, well last year now, when I was given a new iPhone 4 to try out. According to my wife it is an amazing device, a powerful pocket computer that can guide you anywhere in the world, screen mini-movies, play music etc.

The world of Apps is almost infinite. And do you know the one I use most, every night in fact, the little light. There is an App that turns the phone into a torch by which I now read in bed. I was putting it down one night that I realised my crime. I had taken a cutting edge piece of 21st century technology and by my own laziness, ignorance and fear of change, had beaten it back into something that had been around for thousands of years: a lamp.

It was a moment of epiphany, ironic given that it was literally a light in the dark. The boat had steamed so far ahead I was in danger of never catching up. This became clear when I visited the Apple shop in Glasgow to check out a problem with my laptop. I love the idea of the Genius Bar, or stupid saloon as it fits me, somewhere you can go and have things explained to you.

The problem is I don't even have the vocabulary to understand what the chap was talking about. I felt anxiety crackle through my system like an electrical current. What I need to do is set aside time to become au fait with Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else is coming up. For the simple fact is that my life is becoming increasingly difficult, because of my technological primitivism. While colleagues check e-mails or websites while on the move, I cannot.

I think part of the reason for finally deciding to embrace, rather than resist, new technology is the iPad, which I want. I've never wanted a piece of technological kit before. The sheer covetousness is a novel experience and is the final nail in the coffin of John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple and pushed out Steve Jobs. He wrote in his autobiography of Job's plan: "Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High-Tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product."

So that's my New Year resolution, how about yours? For remember that after resolutions had fallen out of favour in the 18th and early 19th century it was Robert Chambers, Edinburgh's great man of letters, who resurrected the New Year's resolution, when he wrote in the Book of Days that "New Year's Day is surely the most appropriate time" for the "recommendation of resolutions of improvement for the year to come". He also went on to quote from Mirror of the Months, a contemporary compilation which intoned: "Every first of January… is an imaginary milestone on the turnpike track of human life: at once a resting-place for thought and meditation, and a starting point for fresh exertion. The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last, must be either very good or very bad."