The days merge, even time doesn’t mean much these days and although I am in the winter of my life I can’t put it all down to age. Yes I accept that my world has gone, its replaced by a new and confusing world, but wasn’t it always thus? And I cannot blame Covid, things were changing around the age of my 30th birthday, some distance away now, and I noticed it first with the music of the day. My comfy Beatles, Stones, Bread, Carole King and many more artists of that period were replaced but something resembling a loud crash landing. Punk had arrived in all its glory and I was shoved aside, not physically but it was the realisation that I was staid, getting old, past it anything you want to say about being a certain age and it isn’t young any more. My music was still around Fleetwood Mac and others saved the day but the tide had turned and there was no going back.
And it is not only music that things were slipping away from me, I had always been interested in technology, but the pace of progress eventually outpaced my understanding of it. 45rpm singles, 33 1/2rpm LP’s, were already on their way out. A shiny new kids was on the block, CD’s, so the wisdom was ditch the old and buy the new, but there was a problem with that. What was new was suddenly out of date and a shiny new gadget came on the scene, super CD. And of course it got worse and we seemed to be forever throwing things away as cassette tapes, Walkman portable devices, along with cassette decks, turntables, CD players, and not forgetting DVD players, music systems in a cabinet, had to go. But the updating broadened its horizons, TV, big valve featured boxes suddenly became incredibly thin items with outstanding pictures. The old boxes had to go,
Mine did, reluctantly, but another new kid on the block was devouring everything, the internet. And this time the big suppliers of our music were getting worried, very worried, the millions that they were making from this old technology was fading away as copying, or ripping in some case, became endemic. And before long even that was superseded by another innovation, streaming, so today along with yet another new shiny gadget that has taken the world by storm its all change again. The mobile phone is a gadget like no other in the past, people queue up to buy the latest one, a bit like they did to see their pop idols at the local cinema or dance hall. They have been around now for quite a while and from the first brick type phone we now have a mobile computer in our pocked as allied to the internet you can literally do all of you daily chores as you are on the move.
Banking, shopping, listen to music or watch films, face to face conversations, messages instead of writing letters. There is not one human endeavour that cannot be done on a mobile phone, well maybe a couple but even here if pornography is your thing then you could be overwhelmed with the stuff. Dating apps, you can pick your partner online then decided to meet, still boy meet girl, or whatever it is these days, but whatever your preferences then you will find it online. But these wonder gadgets do not come cheap, in the UK £1,000 for a phone is not uncommon, in the USA $1,200/1,300 is not uncommon and after a couple years you choose another new phone. So here I am in the ever changing world where I just have to stand back or be overwhelmed by all of the progress. Thing is though I sometimes wonder if it is progress at all and really the older days were really better in some ways. A throw away society has to have somewhere to throw it and the piles of discarded technology is becoming troublesome around the world.
The old ways were, in many ways, not so backward at all, people would mend things, people would make expensive gadgets last longer. Why waste money on new stuff when the old stuff worked just as well, that included things like clothes, which have become throwaway, i.e. fast fashion in the jargon, but some people have made use of all those garments. Vintage shops, where clothes from a bygone age are available, pre-owned, a bit like with cars, we used to call them second hand. Not today, even not so old mobile phones are being resold, but for some people that is not good enough although they maybe only a couple of years old, it must be a new shiny one. The one gadget that I haven’t mentioned yet and shows up the march of progress in some terrifying ways, the once docile PC. I don’t have to tell you what a computer can do these day, and with great efficiency and speed, and we are a long way from the end of that story.
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