The Other Abbey Road: Me and the broadband babes

Me and the broadband babes

First we had the baby boomers; now we have the broadband boomers. I belong proudly to both groups. Remember that tedious experience of photocopying your precious memo, then stuffing it into people?s pigeonholes? Remember the effort of writing important letters that didn?t get a reply for a week or two, or even a month? Remember having to wait in queues at the bank or the travel agent? How did we manage? The fax machine ? that quintessential baby-boomer device ? at last enabled instantaneous long-distance written communication, and heralded the new era. Yet now those days, and even the subsequent era of dial-up internet, have an aura of quaint innocence about them. Today, if I don?t get my broadband connection by breakfast time, I am a junkie doing cold turkey. When our internet connection fails, old-fashioned moralists may tell us to get on with our ?real work? as we did before. But they miss the point. Workplaces, communities, even entire nations are dependent on the internet for information, services, business, communications, entertainment ? every aspect of life. If you are waiting for an important document, or need access to a database, or have to upload a report, turning the clock back and working as you did before is not an option. The world moves on, and the only question for us as individuals is whether we can keep up. In the late nineteenth century, it seemed that Paris had found the ultimate answer to the communications problem, with a city-wide system of instant message distribution and delivery. Those notes were called petits bleus. They were sent at high speed through a network of tubes located in the sewers, and were delivered to their recipients within an hour or so. But, like the fax machine, the petits bleus were overtaken by a piece of new-fangled technology ? in this case, a cumbersome apparatus with irritating cables called the telephone ? and the world had to change its habits.

Source: http://tim-unwin.blogspot.com/2012/07/me-and-broadband-babes.html

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