My wife knows nothing about technology. She doesn’t have a Facebook account and watching her search the web is more frustrating than watching Aston Villa fail to score in four successive Premier League matches.
She cares nothing for the bits and bytes of technology, like much of the world (an oft forgotten detail). But she did mention that she’d heard Apple had released some new technology.
“The Apple iPad,” I said, recognising that while she cares nothing for Steve Jobs’ latest device, she is equally unable to avoid media hype. The iPad – depending on your chosen review – is either a big phone, the greatest innovation ever (since the last Apple innovation, anyway) or the saviour of the publishing industry. Such hype suggests we’re all about to start reading books and papers on our iPads ; my wife’s response to that suggestion?
“Reading is all about relaxing, so why would anyone choose to read a computer screen?”
Quite (now get your own Facebook account and stop using mine to connect with your mates).
I was on holiday in Norfolk last week. Very nice it was, too. I hung around on the beach with my family and counted crocodiles with my daughter. That second bit was in a zoo, by the way – not on the beach…
Fading in and out of network coverage, I spent most of my time in East Anglia without the information conduits that provide my daily fix of Aston Villa news (the Worldwideinterweb), pointless babble from people I don’t really know that well (Twitter) and pictures of people I once knew doing REALLY CRAZY THINGS, like drinking (Facebook). I’ll be honest; I missed all that online rubbish.
I mean, it’s good to go without stuff you like once in a while. Like having a period without booze, dropping your reliance on email and web stuff can leave you feeling cleansed and healthy. My lovely wife – bored with my continual logging on – used to challenge me to have internet free days (IFDs).
I’ve done a few IFDs. They’re OK, but you spend most of the day thinking about how you can stop yourself from logging on. Which means you’re just as internet-obsessed as usual, only you’re thinking rather than actually doing.
A seven day IFS (internet free stretch) allows you to move beyond thinking/stopping/doing. There’s that first period of twitchiness, but you slowly get used to having no online access. In fact, you start to rely on other conduits; in Norfolk, I bought a newspaper every day and read it cover to cover. And I even used Ceefax on our non-digital TV. Yeah, man – old school.
Anyway, I’m back home now and the first thing I did was turn on the computer. I discovered I’d missed out on absolutely nothing, but it was nice to have ‘new faithful’ back. It’s tragic, I know. But I am a sucker for all that online crap.
Social networking is great. You can use Facebook to see photos of people you lost touch with years ago, celebrating the birthday of someone you don’t actually know. You can use LinkedIn to hype yourself up as the latest, greatest ’social media guru’. And you can use Twitter to find out that loads of people got up this morning, ate some food, listened to a bit of music, were busy at work, went home, watched TV and went to bed.
But social networking is also a bit odd. I was watching the news on TV earlier and there was a lot of coverage of Peter Harvey, the teacher from Mansfield who has been charged with attempted murder. After I’d finished my fix of retro information gathering (news on the TV), I went all Web 2.0-tastic and did a search for the teacher on Facebook. And there was quite a bit of stuff, some of which surprised me – names, alleged actions, etc. You know, the kind of stuff the retro media aren’t mean to print in case of prejudicing a trial.
But all that stuff is fair game in the world of social networking. Isn’t it?
There’s been a lot of guff about the carbon cost of Google searching during the last couple of days, with the debate prompted by research from a Harvard academic, which suggests two Google searches produces the equivalent C02 as boiling a kettle. If you’ve found this post through a Google search, I hope you’re enjoying your ‘equivalent’ of half a cup of tea.
The research doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know – in short, searching for stuff, using energy-hungry computers and data centres, eats a lot of power. So, I started thinking about stuff we’re doing that eats power – especially the stuff that is meant to be green.
Take Christmas cards, for example. No one posts Christmas cards anymore (except my wife and her Mum). People send emails, Facebook pokes and electronic cards – it’s meant to convey the same message and can be sent with a cheery: ‘I am saving the environment by not posting a paper card’.
Except you’re not, because all this electronic stuff eats carbon, too. And it’s rubbish anyway – cards are much nicer and much more personal. And I bet posting a card causes less of a drag on resources that all those tweets, emails and pokes. Long live the Christmas card!