Stop The World I Want To Get Off!
Rumour has it they have found the Internet. According to a story I have just read online, it’s been discovered in a warehouse just outside Basingstoke, and certain self-appointed public servants are plotting to shut it down. Odd that you can read a story about looking for something, on the thing you are looking for, but not knowing where it is. Now that’s a story line worthy of The Matrix, which I have to admit I never quite got.
I suspect however, that Basingstoke doesn’t actually hold the key to the end of the online rainbow and much like Osama Bin Laden, it will slip out of our grasp again just as we approach. OBL being of course another great proponent of the Internet, using it to instruct his cohorts to blow up the western devils who run it for him – another Matrix sequel plot perhaps?
Meanwhile we spent, as the soothsayers predicted, at least £5 g-billion online last Christmas. Those of us in the Internet trade like to think that was because we are building better and cleverer websites, but of course it’s actually the take up of broadband that is the horse pulling the cart.
The Internet juggernaut is now well and truly loose and it looks like it will finish the job that Tesco’s have started and rip the heart out of the High Street, driving nails into our declining local communities while the global, virtual community propagates itself like the bacteria in a schoolboy’s kitbag.
As every year passes we have less and less need to step outside our front doors and why bother when the chances of getting happy-slapped by a hooded teenager failed by the system is ever-increasing?
We live in a time when finding yourself without your mobile or with a low battery can induce blind panic. Where your elderly and arthritic grandmother has to remember a PIN number to pay for the cat food. Your car tells you loudly and proudly that you are lost, long before your wife begins to suspect it, and you can now rewind your radio. Put it all together and one begins to fear that the pace of change is outstripping human-kinds capacity to handle it.
My wife is expecting our first child in April and I like to think we will bring it up with traditional values and only buy it toys like coloured wooden bricks and Fuzzy-Felt. In reality, or course, it will no doubt return from nursery school painting class, proudly clutching its innocent, colourful depictions of family life to stick on the fridge door, all perfectly executed in Photoshop 8.2.
So the end is nigh and we’re all doomed. Doomed I tell you. Maybe, if Osama makes the mistake of popping up in Basingstoke then some passing un-manned Yankee nuke can destroy him, the Internet and the Stoke in one go – now that would be a good day. Still, not very likely I guess. Anyway, must dash, my online horoscope alert has just informed my that my eBay bid for tickets to virtually see the GORILLAZ needs upping. Now what was my password?
Sam Brownfield
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