Buried Bucks

My first computer was an Atari 400, with a touchpad keyboard, an awesome 16k of memory, and a cassette-player peripheral used for loading such mind expanding and state of the art games as Buried Bucks.  Techno-envy at the time amounted to lascivious slavering over a friend’s Atari 800 with an unimaginable 48k of RAM and a floppy disk drive for disks that were truly floppy.

High jinks were there to be had from wandering innocently into a branch of Currys or Dixons and finding an unattended display machine, a ZX81 or a Spectrum, and getting busy with a little simple and direct BASIC coding before swiftly exiting said shop:

10 PRINT “FUCK YOU! “

20 GOTO 10

The best humour never ever dates.

Other computers followed in due course.  An Amiga 500+, which provided hours of entertainment (for the player, not the watcher) at Gunship 2000 and Civilisation 1; a pre-iMac Mackintosh, from which non-right-clicking time all my antipathy to the brand dates; a Dell laptop that was, briefly, state of the art, with a price-tag to prove it, and now feels incongruously house-brick heavy.

For a year or so in the 90s I had a Swatch Mobile Phone in lovely lurid lime-green that was only pocket-size if you happened to be wearing a bib n braces overall and was acquired under a contract such as Mephistopheles used to entrap Faust, which predisposed me to pay-as-you-go for years to come  until last year’s acquisition of a Nexus One.

Making a choice between Google, Microsoft and Apple is like picking your favourite member of the WW2 Axis.  If you’ve ever been to EUR outside of Rome you’ll know that the Italians had the best architecture so I guess that might make Apple the Fascists. 

My father was an early adopter of VCR technology in the early 80s.  It just was an unfortunate source of playground social embarrassment that he had lighted upon the technologically superior, but even then clearly doomed, Betamax when all my friends had VHS so that I could never borrow a copy of the critically lauded Kentucky Fried Movie.  Anyhow, I swiftly made myself the house expert on Making The Video Recorder Work Properly. 

As far as school went, I exited the whole system a year or two before the wholesale purchase of BBC Micros and the emergence of ‘technology’ classes – incorporating computers as well as the previous woodwork, metalwork and technical drawing – so my formal training on computers was patchy, to say the least. 

However, a succession of data entry jobs at financial institutions that ought to, for their sake and mine, remain anonymous seriously upped my keyboard skills.  Then the sort of career planning that amounts to making a great leap across a stagnant pond to an uncertain stepping stone and only then wondering where to go to next <repeat to fade > has seen me progress through a series of increasingly technical roles: Systems Librarian, Data Modeller, Excel-whizz and go-to-man for on-the-fly databases.   When I set this alongside my writing activities all I can say is that it’s a Left Brain-Right Brain thing.

I offer this lengthy preamble by way of demonstrating that I am emphatically not a Luddite.  And yet I feel a good deal of ambivalence about e-Book readers.

There is an increasing amount of literature and debate about the extent to which the internet is rewiring our brains, often with particular reference to the hippocampuses (hippocampi?) of London taxi drivers.  A sub-strand of this dispute turns upon e-Book Readers versus traditional books and, for now, I have to say I remain a Dead-Tree-Man.

In large part this is because I have no desire to be rewired any more than I already am.  It’s easy enough to fitter a whole afternoon or evening away with browsing the web, easier and more absorbing than it’s ever been, or foraging around on Twitter, and I suspect that an e-Reader, of whatever brand, might prove to be such an intoxicatingly luscious piece of kit that it overwhelms the actual content.  And what if, having given in to temptation, you find that your concentration span is irrevocably changed, and you can’t ever properly go back?  You could kiss goodbye to most of nineteenth century literature for a start.  I don’t have any truly empirical evidence to hand to suggest that this might be the case, only the observation that the people I do know who possess e-book readers tend to go on and on about the devices themselves without ever mentioning the things that they’re bloody well supposed to be reading. 

I can see the practical advantages of the Kindle et al in terms of the portability of things, though some of the comparisons are a rather specious, of the Kindle v Complete Works of Dickens variety.  But I can only physically read one book at a time and, as such, the average paperback is hardly a burden to carry about.

It’s only the possibility of a very long journey or a protracted stay in some book benighted desert that would be likely to make me give in.  I sustained myself through a 2 x (13 + 8 hour) return trip to Australia, via some furious concentrated smoking on the roof of the transit lounge in Singapore, with A Dance To the Music of Time which, even in its four volume form, proved to be touch and go as to whether I’d be reduced to red-eyed hallucinatory drooling over episodes of Friends.  Then there was a week spent on a Greek Island – Lesbos – where there was nothing to do apart from get tanned and drink Amstel and I ran out of books on day 4 and was reduced to USA Today, though I got my own back by relieving myself on a statue of Sappho.

At root, though, my aversion is simple.  I don’t trust them.  Quite apart from the ironists of Amazon deleting all the Orwell books off peoples’ Kindles, I can’t believe that, even though at root e-books are just text files, they won’t find a way, a la music and video, to keep on making people buy the same things that they've already bought over and over again as each new ‘enhanced’ format emerges.  Then there’s the devices themselves.  I’ve just had to replace and box up an old but perfectly functional printer because it isn’t supported by Windows 7.  And there’s the phone and the TV and the cable box and the DVD recorder and all the rest of the stuff that only adds marginal improvements that you managed without anyway with each successive iteration but which, somehow, the great perpetual China fuelled capitalist revolution obliges you to get involved with anyway.  Do I need something else of that ilk?  No.

Book-books, the ones made from dead trees, are to all intents and purposes indestructible.  I’ve managed never to set mine on fire, although a few have suffered bath time immersions.  And they’re mine and I don’t have to buy them again.  So why, apart from the dead hand of fashion, bother with an e-book reader?  Answers on a postcard please.