The Sound of Bill

[I wrote this in a notebook on 19 Jan and then transcribed it..]

Like a bad dream, I am walking down Oxford Street in London, stripped bare. But this isn’t a dream, because apart from the passive RFID chip in my Oyster card I have no electronic devices on my person and am as technologically naked as the day I was born.

I am on my way to the US Embassy in Mayfair to apply for a journalist visa so that I can visit Austin, Texas in March this year as part of the team making Digital Planet for BBC World Service radio, and the appointment letter I have been sent makes it clear that such things are forbidden on the premises.

Tales abound of those refused admission for possession of an electronic car key fob or a USB stick, and a good friend and colleague was forced to jettison an expensive CompactFlash memory card - about the dumbest piece of electronics it is possible to imagine - before being admitted.

Putting aside for the moment speculation that any country displaying such a degree of caution over the risk posed by electronic devices has already ceded victory to those seeking to ‘terrorise’ it, I have decided to take advantage of my imposed technological cold turkey to reflect on my dependence on kit and connectivity.

It is only forty minutes since I turned off my phone and laptop and deposited them at the left luggage office at King’s Cross station and headed off to Grosvenor Square and I’m now sitting in a cafe near the Embassy waiting for my appointed arrival time.In my bag at the station are my laptop, my mobile phone, my digital camera, the RSA keyfob that lets me log on to the BBC network remotely, my 3G dongle, a USB stick (or two - it’s easy to lose count) and the mini DVI-VGA converter that I suspect constitutes a major profit centre for Apple as I can’t be the only person who keeps losing them and having to buy another. It is actually a tech-lite day for me as I’ve got no audio recording equipment or external hard drives.

The first problem that faces me in my state of technological naturism is what to do for the 3-4 hours that the process of getting to the Embassy, sorting out the visa and getting back to my rucksack is likely to take. There are books, of course, but I also want to be aware of the world outside and so I’ve been forced to by a printed copy of The Guardian for the first time since I downloaded their superb iPhone app, as I don’t have my phone with me. I can’t tweet or check my email or compulsively check what my family and friends are up to on Facebook. I can’t file the overdue column that my editor on BBC Focus magazine is expecting this morning, or write this column except with a real pen on paper made from dead trees, knowing I’ll have to transcribe it later. And I can’t be sure that if something significant happens in the world, either personally or on a more public stage, that I’ll be aware of it. Gordon Brown could resign and I wouldn’t hear, there could be a serious aftershock in Haiti and I wouldn’t find out, or my daughter might drop me a note before her first maths lecture of the day and I wouldn’t get it until lunchtime or later.

Opposite me in this cafe a man is tapping away at his Blackberry, a look of distracted contentment on his face, and I’m jealous of his connectivity. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a brain in a jar, an organ capable of consciousness and awareness of the environment cut off from both sensory and motor functions, unable to experience anything other than the thoughts it can generate and unable to affect the external world in any way.

This may sound like the sad ramblings of a terminally connected man who has lost all sense of perspective. However I would never argue that the network and all that it makes possible is everything about the world but merely that I have built much of my current way of living around it and so here and now, in this cafe, at this time, with these people, I feel cut off from my world.
It isn’t just that I can’t find out about things outside but that I am unable to share, engage, inform or participate in the conversations that I know are happening without me. The two-way conversational internet has become the default, at least for me, and I miss it.

I think this is the difference between the network of the last decade and the one most of us experience in the twenty-teens. Since the mid 1990’s we have been getting the internet ready to support and sustain genuine interactivity rather than the mainframe-style batch processing model of information exchange that the early web offered, where clicking links, filling forms and clicking ‘submit’ was all that could be offered.

Today’s internet is a conversational network, based around immediate connections, instant responses and genuine dialogue. It is the place where I live much of life, and I miss it dreadfully after less than an hour.

[PS I got my visa, so watch out for the Digital Planet special from the South-by-Southwest interactive festival in Austin, Texas in March]