In 1981 my father bought a PC, brought it home and sat it in the corner of our living room. It was a Commodore PET and had 16K of RAM. He would sit in front of it and type in mysterious groupings of numbers and letters and, having hit the return key, got something back which only he understood.
When my friends came round I would introduce them to this wonderful object, the like of which they had only ever seen on television. The problem was, I wasn’t very sure what it was for.
One classmate asked the obvious question, ‘What does it do ?’ He wanted to know if it could tell you what the time was in China right now or if it could say which year the Battle of Waterloo had taken place. When I said that I didn’t think it could he seemed wholly unimpressed.
I don’t know what happened to that friend once he left school but I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to work for Microsoft. That was my first ever lesson in the transformative nature of technology; if something can’t do what you want it to then it’s no use to you at all.
People of my father’s era used computers as number-crunchers and had to be able to understand complex mathematical formulas to get the answers they wanted. Now they are simple hubs allowing us to bring old and new media together and use that information as we see fit.
And there’s the point. Where early PC’s were exclusive and the preserve of the few, they are now democratised and open to all. And the people who understand all the high-tech stuff that makes them work will only stay in a job if they can find new ways for the rest of us to make computers work for us.
Someone asked me just a few months ago, ‘Are you on Twitter yet ?’
I had never thought I would have any need for Twitter or Facebook. Why would I want to use a PC to exchange boring, inane everyday stuff to people I could simply talk to ?
After all, there is only one answer to ‘What Are You Doing ?’ And that is, ‘I’m sitting in front of my PC typing this.’ Until I put prejudice, and maybe snobbery, aside and took the time to investigate.
That was when I got my next lesson in how people transform technology simply by finding their own uses for it. Because I found out quickly that almost no-one on Twitter was bothering to say what they were doing for the simple reason that were too busy doing what they were doing.
Twitter as a technology is being transformed by the people who use it into an information exchange beyond the personal and everyday. It is both a source and a means of dissemination for journalists, propagandists, coup d’etat plotters, salesmen and, eventually, pornographers too.
It is not alone in the new media. Take any example. Facebook was once a way for youngsters to swap details about whose house a party was taking place and at what time. Now Iranian opposition politicians use it to get round censorship in the old, traditional media.
But it is no use to say simply that by transforming the new media to suit our own ends we are creating some brave new world where newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations fold up the deckchair and go home. Because there is the danger that no-one is following you.
As Roland Barthes said, “A text’s unity lies not in its origins but in its destination.” It all depends on effectiveness, on their being an audience for your tweets and that means all those seeking to take the power of Twitter to a different level must learn the lessons taught by Ashton Kutcher.
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