I’m a technology fanatic. I like to, actually love to, play with new bits of electronic equipment. The shear excitement of picking up a small PDA like piece of technology that tells you how to get from the end of your street to your granddad’s house is something I can’t explain. I can’t explain it because if I think about it the whole idea becomes preposterous. I could navigate blindfold from anywhere in the north of England to that destination. I’d manage if you dropped me in Scotland or the south, though I might not take the most direct route.
Still, playing nearly three hundred pounds for the privilege of having an American voice tell me to take the third exit at the turning circle is, for me, nothing short of mesmerising. I can read maps in fact I love maps. In idle hours I could spend ages just looking at the various ways to get from here to there. However having an electronic device to tell me how to do it, and berating it as a useless piece of shit when it doesn’t choose the route I would have, is nothing short of genius.
The Navman I have is collecting a signal from three of the twenty-odd satellites in orbit around the globe and from that telling me exactly where I am. From time to time it’s a few meters out and asks you to return to the nearest road but generally it’s spot on. Not bad considering the size of the aerial, about 1in square, and the size of the earth, considerably more than 1in square.
Mobile phones are another technological gem. I have to admit that I don’t like my current phone. A Motorola Razr V3. Its battery life fluctuates between ten minutes and ten days and the menu system is a maze of myth and unreality that only the people who designed it truly understand. But look at it another way, this thing can ring in thousand annoying tones or vibrate gently on your leg. It can take pictures and send them electronically to anywhere you choose. It can communicate with laptops to become a pseudo modem. It can surf the web. If you are in range of a telecommunications network it can carry your voice into space and back down again. Can you imagine that we take this for granted now? Your voice is turned into bits and bounced off around the globe barely 100 years since Marconi or Tesla or somebody invented radio. Not the same thing I grant you but you see the connection.
The title of this post is the text message I received while I sat in a bar in Antequera. It had travelled the distance between Leeds and this provincial Spanish town in a matter of seconds. With the instruction followed I keyed the green call button. The phone’s processor whirred into action and contacted the nearest friendly phone mast and sent a signal on the most efficient route to it’s destination. That signal arrived in Leeds some seconds later and the processor in another mobile phone stirred. The technological processes involved are amazing but taken for granted now, however, I still can’t get over it when I think about it. All that’s really happened is that a string of 0s an1s have been generated and counted and exchanged electronically but there I was talking to my uncle who had the burdensome task of telling me that my granddad’s life had ended. Quietly and peacefully, in his sleep, he slipped away before dawn on Saturday. Right now I never want the phone to ring again.
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