Technology
Technology is cool. I was talking to my friend Adam online last night as I was listening to the Chelsea Liverpool match radio Five Live through my television. Adam is in Australia and he was watching it on television.
He’s a Chelsea fan so it was good to share it with him, plus I wanted Liverpool to lose. Not that I dislike Liverpool, but being an Everton fan, they are our local rivals. But if they were the only English team in the Champion’s League, I would have wanted them to win – it’s not like I always want them to lose.
It was apparent from the commentary and the timing of our reactions that there was no delay in his broadcast, my radio reception and our connection online.
Even that’s amazing, because twenty years ago when you’d have to get everyone in the room to shut up when you called made a transatlantic phone call and you’d get echo on the line and someone would stand in the background with a stopwatch to time the call which probably cost a arm for the first two minutes and a leg for every thirty seconds thereafter* (*minimum cost: one arm).
I still don’t think that technology has changed that much in the last thirty years, not compared with the jump from the 40’s to the 70’s. I think what we had has improved, but I don’t think we’re flying around on jetpacks getting holojobs just yet.
When I was a kid and my dad explained his world to me, he may as well have landed from another planet that spoke the same language. But when I talk to my son, I talk about the day I remembered being able to control our radio without leaving my chair.
It sounds silly sometimes. “News?” I say to him. “When I was a kid and you wanted to know what was going on in the world you had to wait for a man to come on the television and tell you what was happening.”
Of course, now they have the news on tap, you have a mobile, you have your PC, there is television with live news on three channels and if you don’t want to watch one of those, I can check the news in a little window on the same screen while someone else watches something else.
And if that’s too much of an imposition I can walk over to one of my other televisions and check on there, or go to one of the news channels on my radio, although there I’ll have to wait for someone to tell me the news, but that’ll probably change in the next year or so.
But even before news on demand, you the news thirty years ago was still gathered, if not delivered with the help of satellites. That’s space to you and me.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:32 am
Dull tech explanation from somebody who used to do a dul tech job: There’s something like a six second processing delay on Radio5 through digital TV at the moment. This is approximately the same time as a TV signal’s bounce off two satellites to Australia PLUS another two satellites for your phone call, so the red-hot footie action reaches the two of you at the same time.
As our office cleaner said, hypnotised by the flashing lights on our console: “It’s allllll space”.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:20 am
Wow. When I say talking, we were in a chat room. But what you’re saying is that as we were talking, even though everything seemed normal, our conversation was actually taking place…
in the past?
May 1st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
This is what you get for being six seconds ahead of everyone else Cliff.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Holojobs?
Oh, hang on, think I just worked it out. Like gram but with job.
I would like one of those.