Life Online - Live!
Recently I hosted NetTalks in Wellington – an opportunity for local tech experts to gather in real life and talk about the big stuff – AI, an under-16 social media ban, data sovereignty, and how being able to connect to the internet is as vital to the way we live now as electricity and water.
I’ve been reflecting that, back when the kind of tech we take for granted was just a fantasy (talking to someone through a screen, are you crazy?) I’d lie on the floor in front of the family TV (huge thing that took a moment to warm up) wishing I could either climb through the screen into other worlds or, at the very least, speak to the people in there.
Samantha from Bewitched, I thought, would be great for a chat and I could get her to wiggle her nose and magic something up for me. Like maybe she could arrange for me to meet David Cassidy from the Partridge Family, a thought that filled me with what was either excitement or dread, I couldn’t yet tell the difference.
I suspect our kid-sized tech dreams were inspired by “The Jetsons” cartoon which seriously over-promised the future we would grow into. Anyone watching TV in the 1970s is still waiting for flying cars and a robot to cook the family dinner.
A “telephone with pictures” was, back then, as aspirational as a flying car. Our childhood phones were hefty things bigger than your head which sat on a thing called “a telephone table” in either a freezing hallway or an overly-populated family room which offered no privacy, particularly as you needed the TV sound turned down to hear the person on the other end. This instantly turned your family into an audience, listening to a one-sided conversation. This is how my generation developed our imaginations – turning our mother’s “Did she? Heavens! And what did he say? Pigeons?! Well I never!” into a story that made sense.
The fantasy of actually talking through a screen edged closer to reality with 1980s TV shows like What Now, where you could telephone the hosts live on air, and we would talk to you. Sure it was a push-button handset glued into the arm of the studio’s couch, but it was also magic.
Oddly, I never took to Skype – it felt too intense to phone home from your travels with everyone gathered round a laptop, and if anyone FaceTimed me I’d throw my mobile under a cushion and pretend I wasn’t home.
Covid changed all that. Zoom, Teams, Google Meet – I’d use anything to see my daughter and mokopuna during lockdown, read them a story, see their beautiful faces.
Many of us live a lot of our lives online. I do emails now, not phone calls, and I would rather take a meeting over Zoom than find a car park or navigate public transport. I access my news and social media entirely via the internet.
It is amazing how much human connection takes place now in the ether.
And yet there I was recently, talking about all of that online living, but in a room filled with people who you kind of know but are meeting “properly” now. I like being able to hug, to see expression, hear tone of voice, laughter from the other side of the room.
This is like the other part of that childhood fantasy where, after talking to each other through a screen, you get to climb through it into the same world. Magic.