Now I’m not exactly what you’d call a novice at all this digital technology lark.
I have, for example, been messing around with computers and computer-related stuff since the early 80s. Not just using them but also adding bits to them, modifying them, writing programs for them, and finding ever new ways to break them. Which of course means getting them going again. Well, sometimes.
Then there was the CD revolution… music CDs I mean. Got my very first CD player virtually as soon as they became affordable for the ordinary consumer (ah, those were the days… when I had money). The first in a long succession.
Plus there’s all the other digital gadgetry with which I now appear to be surrounded. Not too sure how I’ve accumulated it all, but I’ve now got practically an entire room full of the damn stuff. And I know how to use it all. Wow!
Then there’s wireless technology.
Well, radio’s been floating around in my life all my life. I remember as a kid, no more than four or five, I used to listen to the “wireless” (as that big wooden box with the bakelite knobs was called, sitting conveniently there on the sideboard… and not leaving much room for anything else) on weekends. Billy Cotton’s Band Show, Desert Island Discs (or was that later?), The Archers… yep, I remember them all.
Then, as a teenager, I had one of those little portable radios in its own leather case. The ones with the internal ferrite rod aerial and the external telescopic aerial that never seemed to make any difference at all. Spent absolutely hours in the evenings, earplug stuffed in ear, listening to the fluctuating static that masqueraded as Radio Luxembourg.
In fact, I’ve just remembered that I also had one of those do-it-yourself radio kits that provided all the bits necessary to build your own crystal radio. Which I did. Marvellous.
And somewhere I’ve still got a couple of little FM radios floating around.
Since then, and much nearer the present day, I’ve tinkered with all sorts of other wireless kit and communications devices. Both professionally and in certain of my other… er… “activities”. P’raps the less said about that the better.
Let’s not forget television either. Once again zoom back to childhood, and there was another huge wooden box, with a tiny little screen this time, stuck in the corner. I wonder why I remember watching Sooty & Sweep but nothing else? P’raps that’s all my mum would let me watch. Hmm. Strange that. Watching a bloke with his hand stuck up an animal’s backside is ok, but mustn’t watch anything else. How odd.
Now I’m not a great fan of television. Far too addictive, and it seems to exert a quite amazing brain-deadening effect. That said, I’ve still got a little portable one stuck in the corner of my lounge, and I distinctly remember switching it on last about… oh, let’s see… 2004 I think. And that was to watch a video! Yep, that’s more technology.
Coming right up to date, there’s the internet. Well, I probably spend more time online (both when I’m home and when I’m “working”) than I do off. And that’s including time spent sleeping!
And not just online casually, but actually “doing” stuff.
But then photography entered the scene.
Digital photography of course.
Now I dunno what it is about photography. P’raps it is that for most of my life I’ve been conditioned into thinking of photographs as actual physical objects, measuring 6″x4″ or whatever. That one can touch, and stuff in frames or albums, and sometimes even tear up.
And I know that no longer applies.
So there am I, sat at home in the computer room, transferring gigs of images all stored on those amazing little memory cards (I’ll get to those in a mo’) to my laptop (er… one of my laptops. Did I mention I’m also a bit of a gadget freak? Digital, naturally).
Then I process them. Then I upload them to Flickr or wherever, via my home network that’s connected to the internet (er… when the internet’s not broken of course).
Don’t have a problem with any of that. Don’t even think about it very much. And when I do, well, its all perfectly normal isn’t it? Certainly nothing to write home about.
Then I come to the next stage. Archiving all the images. Which I store on what’s essentially a networked file server. Plugged in to my wireless router. Which is in another room.
Yeah, I know it would make sense to have it in the computer room. Just accept that I’m a bit weird like that.
Y’see, my home network’s a wireless one. Which means there’s no tangible physical connection between my laptop, where all my photos are, and my networked hard drive (the aforementioned “file server”… in another room don’t forget) where, suddenly, all my photos are also.
And finally I reach the whole point of this seemingly endless ramble. For whilst watching these photographs replicate themselves in another actual physical location (um… not watching the photographs replicate themselves as such but actually watching a flickering light on the laptop, sort of thing) I tend to make the fatal mistake of starting to think about what’s happening.
Which thoughts run along the following lines…
“Here I have a photograph before me. Ok, its on the laptop screen. But I know its here. Its an image I’ve taken with a camera. Me, myself, with a camera. A real, proper one (albeit digital). Which was stored on a memory card (I’ll get to those in a mo’. Or did I already say that?). The image that is. Not the camera you fool. How would you store a camera on a memory card? Be neat if you could though. Hmm.
Anyway, stored on a memory card. An actual physical connection y’see. Then transferred (the image, that is) from the memory card to the laptop. No problem there either. Definite physical connection, achieved by inserting one thing into another. (Is it just me, or is there something vaguely rude about that last sentence?) And I see it before me. Here, on my screen.
Yet now, suddenly, as if by magic, its also in a little box in another room.”
And thinking about that really does my head in. It did when I first had the wireless router. And it still does. Even though, as I’ve already explained at great length, I’m not unfamiliar with all this digital technology caper, nor in fact with all this digital wireless technology caper.
Yet, bizarrely, when I see it working (as I know it should and does) in real time and start thinking about the results of the process (one minute there’s one photograph, then the next minute there’s another identical photograph in another room, yet its still here on my laptop… and there’s no tangible physical connection ‘twixt the two) it quite simply amazes and indeed mystifies me. To the point where I have to stop thinking about it cos my brain starts to hurt.
I’ll now deal with those memory cards, and other miniscule storage devices. USB sticks for example. And that’s it… they’re miniscule! How the hell can I store so many photographs on such tiddly little things?
And before some clever clogs starts explaining the science behind it p’raps I should point out the question was rhetorical.
I already know the science behind it. Well, in principle anyway.
But don’t we all just take such things for granted nowadays? How often do we spend time actually thinking about the reality of what’s happening, and how it compares to our normal everyday experience of the world around us?
If, for example, I could plonk my weekly shopping onto a little plastic card (or even a USB stick) I wouldn’t have to lug two (or sometimes more) bloody great bags all the way home every week.
Things occupy space, and have volume (and weight, where my damn shopping’s concerned!). Don’t they? Nope! Not in the digital world they don’t. Yet all that digital “stuff” that almost doesn’t exist in reality can result in actual tangible physical objects practically at the touch of a button.
It may well be that most other folk take all this science stuff for granted. Well, p’raps its simply that my mind is living in the wrong time (like 500 years ago) but I don’t! To me there’s rather more than a touch of Magic about it all.
Which is the reasoning behind yet another contribution from me for this month’s theme. Digital storage, and digital wireless, technology…
