NEVER SAY NEVER

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Those who decry modern technology today will maybe live to forever regret having made the statement. We for one, one day might regret even publishing The Astonisher but progress we have got and we are going to have to embrace it. Of course we will resist it every step of the way, why change things just for change sake?

Back when a Hansom Cab used to take me to school, that’s if I wasn’t walking both ways uphill, and barefoot in snow, I blabbered and blustered over allowing children to have calculators in the classroom but the sky didn’t fall in, they can’t read an analogue clock but that’s a petty matter, we wandered what they would ever do if their batteries ran flat. Now many of them are now solar powered.

We tut-tutted about computers being allowed into schools even before you could put them in your back pocket. Technology has advanced even now to the point where a standard mobile phone has more capacity than Australia’s first big computer which took up an entire room.

RDJ-FM community radio was once offered a free multi-monitor computer system that a law firm was disposing of. But you’re going to need a separate room to put it in. It’s really big it has the capacity to work ten terminals and has a massive 2 Gigabyte Tape Drive. We declined the offer, not because it was old but because we didn’t have the space for it and it had to have its own air-conditioning system to cool it.

Even earlier when working at AGL in Sydney I always admired the fellows in their white coats, fiddling about in their air-conditioned glass-paneled room changes big reels of tape from one machine to the next like projectionists in a theater. Upstairs about 50 women typed out punch-card manually received from the meter readers for the computer to send your bill. It was a huge leap forward technologically from when little metal capsules used to be sucked along tubes to the accounting department or even before that fired like a tethered rocket across the room to the cashier who would then rocket it back to your counter.

Yes we have come a long way from those heady days of advancing modernity. We now know that we are part way along that journey. From listening to transistor radios and Walkman tape machines, to carefully centering vinyl discs of varying sizes and revolutions to the mobile phone that does everything today and will possibly even wipe your arse next month.

Lets face it, Nobody wants to return to the good old days of homophobia or xenophobia, sexism or racism even though our religious and political leaders would like us to. But here, before we end we would like to issue a word of warning. Just because it exists doesn’t mean we have to have it. Life is for living not shopping.

Yes we must progress but for heavens sake only progress as far as we want to and not where we are told to. Don’t get caught up in the hype of bigger houses on smaller blocks of land, changing your mobile phone every year, signing up to lifetime contracts we will never need and gift card we will never use. We have a policy, even when going crazy at auctions. There are two states of mind when considering a purchase. Do we need it, will it make our life easier, better, more productive? Or do we want it, just so we can say we have one, use one or just want to flash it around.