Out

This may seem a strange and somewhat counter-intuitive statement to make in a blog, but I do find myself increasingly feeling that I would like out from the world of digital technology, and back to a simpler time when maybe less was at our fingertips but our engagement with the world and with one another was more wholesome and genuine.

Don't get me wrong;  I am an enthusiastic user of technology, and I do much of my work on-line.  I love the fact that I can find out all kinds of things, make all kinds of contacts, buy all kinds of commodities, here at my keyboard.  A few months ago, I needed a hat . . . well, wanted one, anyway:  a black fedora.  I drove the eighteen miles to Shrewsbury and searched every shop that sold hats, and a fair few that I thought should but turned out not to.  Nowhere could I find a black fedora that would fit me, and that a retired former cleric could actually afford.

Back home, on-line, I found and ordered a hat within fifteen minutes, and paid what seemed to me an unbeatably low price.  The hat turned up two days later, and fitted perfectly.  I'm not surprised the high street is dying, or at least changing rapidly from its traditional form (or at least, the form I've known all my life until now).  Actually, I will come back to high streets, as I have some thoughts and ideas, but that's for another time and another blog.  Anyway, I'm not surprised that high street shops are struggling to compete, but I'm sad.  High Street shopping when I was young was not just about buying things, but also about meeting people, and about being part of the bustle, part of the life of the place.

Ah, but I can meet people on-line, and so many more of them!  Leaving aside the fact of avatars and multiple personalities, and that how do you really know that the person you're conversing with as really who and what he or she claims to be (and leaving aside the fact that some people would say of that "Does it matter?"), while I can see some value in the way the internet enables interest-groups and networking, I worry about those people, those many people I think, for whom this has become their main means of social interaction.  New on-line communities may be springing up, but other real communities, geographically based and centred, are crumbling.  The internet isn't the only factor here of course - TV and other media, and the ease with which we can travel, and the simple fact that work patterns are much more complex than they used to be, all of this plays its part.  But the internet has rather hurried things up.

More so, of course, for people a generation or two below mine;  cyber-sex, cyber-bullying, the application of all kinds of pressure on malleable young minds - I worry about this, and so I think should you.  There is immense damage being done within the generation who are presently in their teens, and while I do not lack confidence in the ability of most young people to make their way through the minefield that is adolescence, it is I think much more of a minefield now than it was in my day.  The internet provides young people with so much more power than we ever had, the more so in this day of tablets and smart-phones;  and even though that power is often in reality spurious and false.

For this is what it comes down to, in my mind;  if we possess technology, then that's good, it gives us power, access, knowledge, opportunity . . . but what about when technology possesses us?  That, it seems to me, is what it will always try to do, as we give it more and more of our time and our commitment.  The wise will recognise the boundaries that need to be kept, the priorities that will need to be reviewed;  but not all of us are wise, or not in any case until after the event.