If you took my computer away from me, I would cease to exist. I don’t say this because I am a spotted and horn-rimmed-glassesed geekette, because I believe that I am in the Matrix surviving only through my connection to the www (or whatever the hell that movie was going on about) or because I have some kind of Internet gambling addiction. I would cease to exist as a member of the human race because all of the principle relationships and weekly activities of my life are conducted on my computer within the arachnophobic electronic confines of the World Wide Web.
Just like you, there is my paid employment and the basic access to information that in th noughties we now take for granted. I read newspapers online from three countries in two languages, I use my online translation tool when I don’t understand a sentence in a magazine, I have personal and professional emails, Twitter and Facebook; you know, the usual suspects of a 21st century working woman. I know my bytes from my bits and my HD from my HiFi.
I also keep a keen eye on my favourite TV shows. I watch the prepubescent sing on X-factor, Survivors eating spiders, Masterchefs bruléeing crème and Top Models pouting in pink from all corners of the world and even watch the local telly online. My passion for Masterchef is great, but not great enough to keep me in front of the box until half past stupid'o'clock to find out if Marie stopped crying long enough to demiglaze her confit. So I take advantage of the online VOD, often at 6am, when the very real garbage trucks wake me up.
Alternatively laughing and crying, I maintain a vigil over the milestones of our family through video calling. Any international traveller will espouse the wonders of Skype to avoid the astronomic cost of mobile calls. I watched my niece walk for the first time, I was introduced to my nephew and even sing Twinkle Twinkle to them; a random singing voice with spirit fingers coming live to you from inside of a laptop. Even odder is that my niece is nonplussed by the fact that my brother speaks to a computer and a crazy lady calls her name from within. What comes after the tech savvy Generation Y? Generatio 011100110110110101100001011100100111010001100001011100100111001101100101?
Again, it’s completely normal that someone who chose to live on the other side of the world speaks to her loved ones online. But I take it one masochistic step further…The F-word and I live in two different countries. Kisses goodnight, love and affection and even the odd fight are all brought to you live and in colour from out there in the ether. I re-watched a film about Piaf last week, and was reminded that her and her husband were often a whole Atlantic apart. I thought to myself, how did people manage to maintain a close relationship with a pen and paper?
The same way I did when I was an exchange student eighteen years ago. Sending stamped airmail letters home once a week on wafer thin tissue paper because it weighed less. Waiting impatiently for Maman to return home from the Poste on Saturdays with the weekly missive from my mother; we are fine the dog was sick and Madonna has a new record (yes record is how we said it back then). Once upon a time I lived a life without a mobile phone, without two or even one laptop computers, without Google, without Wikipedia, without iTunes and without IMDB. How did I ever complete a crossword puzzle?
Everyday of my life I listen to the radio from UK on my laptop in the house. I remember copying the cassette of the soundtrack to the Little Mermaid from a friend when I was in high school. Are you more shocked by the fact that I copied a cassette or that I listened, voluntarily, to the soundtrack of a Disney cartoon.
A couple of weeks ago, a boy I know, and local poster by for Generation Y, asked me how I used to manage my life without a mobile phone, “because, well you know, you are old.” While my hand formed a small fist behind my back, he went on “back before we had mobiles, how would you know where your friends were”. Resisting the urge to shove his Blackberry, and all other devices named after fruit where the sun don’t shine for likening me to a living history exhibit at the National History Museum (do I look like Simon Wiesenthal to you?) I responded coolly, ‘we did this really novel thing; we opened our mouths, we allowed air to vibrate across our vocal cords and we spoke to each other”. Such ignorance from a boy who uses Facebook statuses to share his ablutions with the viewing public.
Like 25M other people in France, I recently watched The Social Network. An excellent film, well acted and superbly written, many of my friends (real, not online) and I were left asking the same question. Mark Zuckerburg created a website. He didn’t cure cancer. Just why is the bloke who invented Facebook so rich?
But surprising even to most of my high-definition-video-calling-intimates is that I also conduct weekly psychotherapy sessions with my long-suffering therapist, back in Australia, through Skype. What is perhaps obvious to all except me is that my need for weekly video calls where I cry at a screen as the voice from within advises me to breathe and reflect is a direct consequence of my reliance on the fibre-optic to sustain my optical fibre … and so the vicious cycle continues.