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By Author: allan
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Hold On a Moment, I Want Some New Technology(http://www.watchescat.com/) That LastsJohn Updike once sourly but accurately observed, these days we are all conditioned to accept newness, whatever it costs. Very soon, no doubt, Apple's tablet will seem as an essential tool of modern living to us as the electric trouser-press did to our grandparents. At least, it will until someone manufactures an even smarter, thinner and more essential tablet. Which, if recent history is any guide, will be in approximately six months time.And that's the bewildering thing, isn't it? Turn your back for a moment and you find that every electronic item in your possession is as dated as a mildewed tombstone." Which wouldn't be so bad in itself. Why should you care if people snigger because you use a mobile phone that actually predates Barack Obama's presidency?But try getting the thing repaired when it goes wrong. It's like walking into a pub and asking for a Dubonnet and lemonade." You will be made to feel like some sort of time-traveller from the 1970s. "Don't you want an upgrade?" you will be asked, incredulously. "It's not worth repairing that ...
... old thing."And so the mountain of dumped electrical debris grows. A few years ago a satirically-minded sculptor constructed a gigantic statue made from the exact number of electronic goods that an average British person was estimated to discard in a lifetime.9 It weighed three tons, stood 7ft high, and included five fridges, eight toasters, six microwaves, seven PCs, six TVs, kettles, seven vacuum cleaners and 35 mobile phones.10Even then, the calculation seemed on the conservative" side. Only 35 mobiles? In a lifetime? As every parent knows, any teenager will get through at least five phones each year. One will drown in the pocket of a pair of jeans chucked in the washing machine. One will be lent to a girlfriend who has moved to Ipswich. One will be stolen during PE13. One will be left on a bus. And one will be accidentally flushed down the loo of a dodgy club in Camden Town."The enormous number of electronic items now regularly chucked out by British families is clearly one big problem. But this ceaseless discarding of gadgets has other consequences. It contributes greatly, I think, to the uneasy feeling that modern life is whizzing by faster than we can keep up. By the time I've learnt how to use a gadget it's already broken, lost or redundant17. I've lost count of the number of TV remote-control thingies that I've bought, mislaid and replaced without working out what most of the buttons did.And the technology changes so bewilderingly fast—not least in the media world. Was it only 30 years ago that I saw my great predecessor William Mann (the music critic of The Times who famously declared the Beatles to be the finest songwriters since Schubert) sitting in the newspaper's canteen after a concert and writing his review—with a fountain-pen!—for that night's edition? And was it less than years ago that I spotted a high-powered businessman friend towing what seemed to be either a large crate or a small nuclear bomb on wheels through a railway station. "Good grief," I exclaimed. "What have you got in there? Your money or your wife?"Neither," he replied, with the smug look of a man who knows he's at the cutting edge22 of technology, no matter how ridiculous he looks. "This is what everyone will have soon—even you. It's called a mobile telephone."I don't lament23 the pace of change. On the contrary, I'm dazzled by those high-tech designers who can somehow fit a camera, music-player, computer, phone and satellite navigation system into a plastic slab no bigger than a packet of fags. Or invent a vacuum cleaner such as the one recently showed to me that can suck fluff straight into a dustbin via a system of pipes in your house walls. (All you have to do is rebuild your entire home.) If the geniuses who dreamt up that could also find a way to keep the Tube running on the first snowy day of winter, they would be making real progress for humanity.What I do regret, however, is the built-in instant obsolescence of so many household items. My parents bought a wooden wireless in 1947, the year they were married. If 1973, the year I went to university, it was still pumping out29 Family Favourites and The World at One. It sat in the kitchen like an old friend—which, in a way, it was. It certainly spoke to us more than we spoke to each other on some grumpy30 mornings.True, it had idiosyncrasies. You had to know exactly how to tickle its knobs or tweak its dials to conjure discernible speech and music from the crackle. But that was its mystique. When my mum replaced it with a new-style radio that could also play cassette-tapes (gosh, remember them?) I felt a real sense of loss.Such is the frenetic turnover of 21st-century technology that there's no time to forge emotional bonds. Even if Apple's new wonder-toys turn out to be the most significant tablets since the big ones that Moses dragged down the mountain34, I very much doubt that they will resist the here-today-gone-tomorrow trend.( http://www.watchescat.com/)