Tech column: The history of everything technology…

I'm coming up with different ideas for a technology column. So far I've knocked up three. I'll post em here as they're never likely to see the light of day otherwise:


The history of everything technology…
No.264 – The blog

Ever since his first depictions of hunting inscribed on cave walls, it has been a basic desire of man to boast and to bore as many people as possible with details of his perfectly normal and largely tedious life.

Pornography and religion have always seized upon the latest technology, but it remains a little recognised fact that lofty expectations of people’s interest your everyday musings, have played just as important a role in early technological adoption. 

The Bible was first off Gutenberg’s presses in the 1400s, largely thanks to the fact that Johann had already taken big orders for a series of scurrilous and filthy publications. But what history has failed to record is that Gutenberg also took the opportunity to produce a weekly journal covering everything he had been up to in Mainz over the previous seven days.

“I had to get up early this morning,” reads the only surviving scrap of an estimated 400,000 printed copies of Mein Woche, circa 1451. “I hate getting up early.”

The same was true of CB radio. Thousands of seemingly normal people rushed out to buy the latest in wardrobe-sized valve technology so they could speak to people they would never meet. The geographic separation was the very point for most hams. Not, as is often mistakenly believed, because the act of instant communication with someone on the other side of the globe provided a simultaneous sense of both humbleness and power. But because strangers and foreigners were the only people that would withstand the same tired observations about life without resorting to violence.

But when Norwegian fishermen threatened to destroy Hull with studded haddock unless one particularly monotonous ham was taken off the airwaves, the government was forced to act. For two years, the very fabric of society was in danger while new licensing laws, introduced under the cunning guise of gross commercialism and taxation, were introduced.

The warning was not heeded however. Mr Gutenberg would be type-setting thankyou letters in his grave to know that his “moveable type” innovation was to become the name of computer software some 500 years later that would allow tens of hundreds of thousands of people to share similar global inanities.

And so it is that blogs, formerly Web logs, have drawn on the long lineage of pointless comment. A global phenomenon? A revolutionary data pistol? Or the greatest accumulation of guff ever blown from the recesses of the human mind?

History will record that those clever individuals who decided to make publishing on the Internet so simple that even a monkey could tell us about the state of his peanuts this morning, were driven by the very highest of motives: cash. Yet it is hard not to be filled with empty despair at the thought of 15 million “bloggers” across the world fruitlessly typing the dregs of their daily drudge into a keyboard convinced that there is a single life-form out there interested.

At any given moment, 10,000 people are announcing to the world that they don’t like getting up early. An incredible 1,246,765 individuals will today tell you what their coffee was like (72 percent will be happy with it – another victory for the bean in its titanic battle against the leaf).

There will be a new guy at work in nearly 36 percent of people’s daily warblings and his failure to fit in will alone account for a staggering 25.9 billion anecdotes by 2008, with less than a half-a-percent of them rated “amusing” or “slightly amusing” by independent humour experts. By 2010, it is estimated, every single woman on this planet will post at least one electronic public message a day about her hair.

These are, of course, heady figures. But history also has something to teach us of these outpourings’ likely fate. In societies where new technology has allowed people to detail their most insipid thought processes without fear of retribution, the state has always eventually intervened to purge everything but its society’s highest cultural peaks.

 â€œIf I read one more manuscript about the liberating force of democracy, I’ll take a torch to this place,” were reportedly the last words of Alexandria’s chief librarian in 400BC. God only knows what he’d have made of blogs.