An Electrical Perspective

11/10 of my friends would say that I’m weird. I am an English geek who can’t spell, a sound geek who can’t play an instrument, and a computer geek who can’t clock a game without the cheat codes.

Hi, My name is Rowan, and I’m an electronicaholic.

But then, dear reader, so are you. Perhaps not to the same extent that yours truly is, but still, in no small measure, you are an electronicaholic. This, not all to shocking realisation, has come upon me as I travel down the South Island of New Zealand. I have been looking at some stunning views, thinking how easily Sir Peter Jackson filmed here, as it dawns on me: I live my life through an electrical perspective.

I, until today, have never been farther south than Christchurch. A little city on New Zealand’s East coast – and while I have seen all of this before, it seems like so much Lord of the Rings, so much movie set – and in my mind, at least, it all exists in two dimensions.

We see so much, too much, that way now. We take pictures – not for the memories but for the instant buzz when someone likes our flattened moment of time. Ironic, then, that since the digital age has become more prevalent that our pictures have become more permanent – no more slide shows at Nana’s house when she comes home from a three-month long cruise and relives the memories. Instead, we live it in the instant moments after she has taken the picture as it pops up on a news feed halfway round the world.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that all this technology is a bad thing – nor indeed that we should go back to those old fashioned slide shows – but I do believe that we should recognise that we more and more experience the world around us through a digital lens – either ours or another’s.

As a Video geek (OK, OK, I’m a fully-fledged geek), I perhaps observe this more than others. When going to a concert, one of the most common sights is people filming the concert on their cellphones. Now, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but why have they paid $100+ to go and see a concert only to view it on a five inch screen with awful sound? An electrical perspective? And a bad one at that. Especially when you can buy the concert on a medium of your choice for less than $50 and enjoy it with all of your friends, at a time and place of your choosing, in comfort, with places to sit and nary a fear of missing anything.

The Digital World is not coming – The Digital World is here. We spend our days looking at computer screen – electrons flying in different patterns governed by an endless string of zeros and ones. When we get home we watch TV or play on the computer where our digital movements are recorded and analysed by mainframes, so that, along with the rest of our digital footprint generated while shopping and getting those fantastic discounts, the annoying ads that pop up will be less and less annoying and more pointed to what we would like to see. So after our phone has tracked where we have been and what we have done for the day, our supermarket has logged what we’ve bought; our gym has noticed how long we were there for; our car has tracked how hard we were on the engine; the insurance app has recorded every time we have been over the speed limit; our bank has noted where we spent our pay check, how quickly and on what. And finally, after all that, our internet activity is logged, our faces tagged, our profiles linked with friends. We must come to the inescapable truth that not only do we all have a digital footprint; we all, Dear reader, are eletronicaholics.

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