A Brave New World

"The telephone is a fantastically rude invention - it's like someone bursting into your office, banging on your desk and yelling 'Speak to me! Speak to me!" Stephen Fry said that, and he knows stuff about things. Me, I have an abusive relationship with phones. A while back, I was sitting watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (yes I know) with a friend ten years younger than me (yes, I know), and one of the characters had failed to meet the other at a cafe at a prearranged time. She asked why she didn't call the missing person's mobile, and I explained that it was filmed in the late nineties, not everyone had a mobile then. I didn't get my first mobile 'til about 99, and it was a brick. But the point is, she sat for a second, processed this information, and then asked possibly one of the worst things you can say to someone ten years older than you: "What was life like before mobile phones?" Well for one thing, we were fucking organised. It seems impossible to impress on anyone younger than 25 the baffling notion that I don't want to be available to them 24 hours a day, and that this is in no way a slight on them. For years I've apologised, made excuses and avoided talking on phones and come away feeling like I'm the antisocial one, as if by not immediately answering people's calls and texts I'm personally slighting everyone I know. But sod you all. I was just drifting off for an afternoon nap when my phone clattered onto vibrate beside me and woke me up. What was it's message? An urgent request for kidney donors of my registered blood type? Something's on fire? Zooey Deschanel is wandering through town and she's totally getting them out for anyone who asks? No, it was a stupid sodding chain text, the same one I've recieved three times so far today. I've had enough. Don't get me wrong, I love my mobile as a compressed piece of technology. The fact that it's a decent digital camera (well, mine is), an mp3 player, web browser and java platform all packed into a pocket sized shell is great. It's handy. It's the nearest I'll ever get to owning a sonic screwdriver in this lifetime. But every time the damn thing fulfils it's primary function by ringing, I feel that moment of irritation, of interruption. I know it's going to ring, and if I cut it off the caller's going to try again in a few seconds assuming a network fault. If I leave it to ring, it'll only go off with a voicemail in a bit, and then there's the inevitable 'tried to call you' text that follows, and the texts that follow THAT if you don't answer. You can't win, and it's not even your fault - you HAVE to deal with a ringing phone, even if it's just to throw it in a ravine. It's not just mobiles though. Xbox Live - now that I've accidentally paid for Gold again - is starting to get the same. I go online to play something single player, and if I've accidentally left the network cable plugged in, I get bombarded with requests to play multiplayer. At least I used to have the excuse of being a silver subscriber, but now people know I'm gold, they won't leave me be when all I want to do is load up Dead Rising quickly and smash zombies with hammers. We have so many exciting new avenues open to us now to irritate the shit out of each other, and it's done something fundamentally terrible to our society. It's the bloody invasiveness of it all that gets me. Peripheral hangers-on in a group at the pub could be ignored or avoided, or fobbed off with promises that you'll get back to them later. But now they're on your Facebook - they have to be, or you'd get a successive stream of whiny messages and requests until you add them. And then they can see and involve themselves in everything you do, which just makes their presence even more invasive. MSN, Facebook chat, mobiles, email... It's like we've armed all the bastards with sharp sticks and then wonder why everyone keeps getting poked all day long. And I realise: It's not a brave new world at all. It's a sodding annoying one.