A Personal History of the Digital Juggernaut

Kale plants blossoming

When I graduated in 1996 I had used email a handful of times, just out of interest really, using my university's email system to contact schoolfriends studying at other universities. I had no mobile phone, in common with the vast majority of people. I took a gap year and spent six months in Jamaica working in schools, churches and youth groups, during which time my only contact with home was with airmail letters and the occasional reverse-charge call to my mum from a public phone booth.

In 1997 I started working in London for a technology company called Psion Software. One lunchtime at the pub a colleague fetched emails onto her Psion clamshell by connecting it to a mobile phone with a cable and dialling up an ISP. It was amazing. This was the future. I bought myself a Nokia 3110 from Carphone Warehouse, one of the first of my circle to own one.  I had 20 minutes a month on my contract. The first call I ever made was outside Charing Cross station one evening to a university friend who also had one, just to try it out. The strange feeling of being able to talk to anyone without the phone being tethered indoors I can distinctly recall.

As I worked with computers all day I resisted having one at home for some time but eventually gave in and by about 2001 I had myself a desktop in my room, connected to a flatmate's router by long wires that trailed through the flat.

At that time I was working in an office up on the 15th floor of Capital House by Edgeware Road tube station, still for the same company (which had since morphed into Symbian). It was there that a colleague first mentioned the word Google, singing its praises over the pedestrian Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves search engines. It wasn't long before I was using it all the time, the internet becoming more and more part of my (and everyone's) life.

A friend who worked for my church as a youth worker was the first person to tell me about Facebook. All the kids were on it he said! I was galled that I hadn't already heard about it given I was in the tech industry.

I did hear about Twitter before a lot of people and signed up on Jan 2007 to give it a whirl (yes I've been on the thing for 10 years). I wasn't so impressed but obviously millions disagreed.

By this time I was working for Skype, leading projects to get Skype working on mobile phones. I got to play with a lot of different smartphones including one called a Skypephone which had a Skype-call button on it. Getting through customs to Israel on a work trip with a whole stash of mobile handsets in my bag took some explaining.

A path under construction

Laptops replaced desktops, at work and at home. Wifi replaced wires and cafes everywhere began to let you use it for free. Smartphones and tablets became ubiquitous and brought the internet, email and social media to our fingertips, wherever we were. People got used to being always connected. Work emails became something you checked at all times, not just in the office. It became mandatory for young people to be on social media or be a social recluse.

This juggernaut of a technological revolution is not stopping and in the course of 20 years has just about changed everything about the way we lead our lives.

I stepped off the juggernaut for a while and began growing veg, yet still use the internet every week to post my blog and look up how to do stuff. Having a mobile phone when living alone in a field does prove very useful even if I can only get intermittent 2G service.

Yet I feel there's a sinister edge to the direction of digital progress with the “Internet of Things” on the ascendancy, let alone roboticisation and armed drones. That'll have to be another blog. In the meantime check out Werner Herzog's film “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World”, it's wonderful.