Dispatches from the digital divide

August 9 2014

A hair’s breadth away

Who would have thought the Digital Divide was the width of a village hairdressing salon on the north east coast?

I’m sitting quietly avoiding my reflection waiting for the owner to finish applying colour to the strands of her customer on the other side. Their conversation takes a technical turn.

“I think I’ve lost all my photos,” says the customer holding up her iPhone.

“What you can do is have your pictures automatically sent to iCloud then you can save them on iTunes,” advises the owner. “I was quite proud of myself learning that.”

When she came over to start my cut, I apologised for overhearing but explained how I was keen to improve my ability to do digital tasks.

“What phone have you got?”

“A Samsung Galaxy.”

“It only works on Apple, I’m afraid.”

I might have known!

As I’m leaving, the customer’s conversation reverts to more typical lines. “Last Friday, I wouldn’t say mortal, but I was definitely merry.”

July 29 2014

Toeing the line

My wife loves her cameras – the exquisite Pentax ME in its leather ever-ready case, one of her few possessions when we met 35 years ago; the early Canon EOS which has faithfully archived our family since the last century and now hangs bewildered by neglect from the coat rack in the hall. She loved deliberating shot by shot, but never missed an opportunistic snap.

For a present I bought her a Sony Cybershot. Our famous photographer friend has one in her armoury. No one, she says, can resist the digital tide. My wife hates having to hold it a mile from her face and guess what’s on the sun reflecting screen, gets mad at the cryptic menus that pop up. But one use she has found is photographing her foot in a shoe that tripped her up when encountering flagstone whose edge was raised a millimetre. The picture is to support a complaint to the online retailer.

“Can you attach it to the email?” she requests.

Sinking feeling. She has faith that I can help with computer related matters such as attaching invoices to emails to health club where she teaches yoga. I have faith in her ability to use the TV remote to record programmes. We lean on each other in these simple ways to get by.

So I experiment with connecting the Sony to a port in the computer. There’s no message that it’s detected the presence of the camera. After trial and error I find it’s on drive F. The camera disgorges all its pictures on to the screen, including the shoe which I highlight. I click “attach” on the email and it offers me the option of “inline picture”. Which I take. Wow – the shod foot with its red toenail is life size. I only wanted to attach it as file. But anyway – off it flies. No small triumph.

Now to save it to the computer’s gallery, if that’s the right word. But I can’t find it. I’m suffering digital fatigue. Maybe our daughter-in-law will rescue me. But that’s for another day.

July 8th, 2014

If it doesn’t roll it don’t seem right

At the Newcastle Zen group every month we listen to a recorded talk from Throssel Hole Abbey. The monks used to record talks on a tape machine. Whilst one monk told guests about some aspect of meditation, another with headphones acted as sound engineer. The tape rolled and the trees down the valley outside bowed to the heavy North Pennine winds.

When we got a copy on cassette, you could see it rotate inside the window of the group’s dumpy little player. There was a symbolic connection to the original event. The cassettes were superseded by CDs, less fallible but still tangible. Recently our group had clear-out. The accumulated CDs were given away to digitally challenged members such as myself.

These days the talks are downloadable from the Abbey website. Steve our group’s informally acknowledged leader brings in his iPod wherein the talks invisibly reside. He touches it to portable speakers and what happens? Silence. As Steve fiddles around, I venture: “We didn’t get this Bluetoothy, digital sort of problem when we had good old reliable CDs.”

“CD’s are digital, Dave,” replies Steve. The iPod connects. The talk begins. It sounds very clear. Almost as if you were there.

June 25, 2014

 Confession

I wince whenever I hear the word Twitter. It sounds so trivial. Yet rebels use it to run their revolution, statesmen to announce their resignations, Daz to tweet to followers (whatever that means) who somehow have the time.

It’s not just Twitter. There’s a digital divide. On the far side is the enlightened multitude who are fluent in Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, iTunes, Kindle and all things digitally enabled. On my side is a retro bunch of the kind who applaud Len Goodman’s declaration on Strictly that he belongs to the clockwork era.

What does that make me, a technophobe? Not at all. I’ve managed to grasp and write clearly about biomedicine, genetic imaging, nanotechnology, IT networking, computer adaptive educational testing, financial software, catalysts, renewable energy, smart grids, petrochemicals. Gimme more.

In my own use of technology for business I was once ahead of the game. I saw the first Amstrad word processor in a shop window. I’ll have one of them. I heard a guy on a train making sales calls on brick-like device called a Motorola cell-phone. I’ll have one of them. The agency I worked for part-time in Cambridge told me I needn’t Red Star my copy from Liverpool Street Station; they were replacing their old fax machine. Have it, Dave.

All told, these aids pretty well doubled my productivity. I was even ahead of clients. I used to drive down the Holloway Road at night and post urgent scripts through the letter box of Infovision. This production company had a block in Islington stuffed with monster machines like the Aston Caption Generator, Paintbox, rooms of tape editing and storage. But they didn’t have a fax. I was also ahead of other freelance copywriters who bike-couriered what they’d written to have it professionally typed.

So when did I start losing ground? I had the internet when it still made a noise. I took to writing websites, because they suited a fairly organised mind. But lately I’ve come across a breed of copywriters who never stray beyond the virtual world and social networking. So what that they can’t trace their adland ancestry back to Madman. Their territory is expanding.

So I’m not going to sit smugly on my analogue laurels, but put my faith on a rickety rope bridge of learning that crosses a dark fissure to the digital dimension. If you too feel you need to move on, follow these Dispatches and learn from my experiences. Just don’t look down.

June 25, 2014

Screen ban

How would you feel and what would you do if you banned yourself from all screens for a month? That was the task my son Jack set himself for his MA dissertation at Goldsmiths College. So he set aside his Macbook Pro and reached for his bookshelf.

In the first week his phone calls to us were euphoric. He felt a great sense of freedom and consumed vast helpings of print on paper. But as the days wore on he began to feel… lonely.

Jack made a record on video of how his month on the imageless side of the Digital Divide unfolded. How could he do that without a screen? See my next post for link.