Technology is really ruining things for my tiny pea-brain. These days, I have trouble watching thriller movies from any era before there was ubiquitous mobile phone ownership. I sit there watching our hero desperately trying to beat the clock across town/to the aeroplane/to the editor’s desk and all I can think is, “Put in a call, man. Let your fingers do the walkin’. The coverage can’t be that bad.”
Another one: I’m reading a perfectly respectable little sci-fi book at the moment called The Sails of Tau Ceti that has gone hopelessly out of date in sixteen years. The author just didn’t see the internet coming. One of the central plot requirements is that there is only a mainstream press for the aliens of dubious intention to manipulate in order to take a claw-hold on earth.
The baddies take advantage of an old style news ownership model and cleverly fool the various outlets into not noticing some important things. People are still tearing things off faxes and printing out pages to read. The news has to ‘come out’ and people can’t do a search on the subjects of their choice.
It’s funny, but now the conspiracy theorists have access to an international soap-box and we the readers choose whatever the hell we want to consume, I think an intergalactic plot of Earth domination would be harder to pull off. It’s the democratisation of gossip that will save us from the little green men. The sites we go to see the Britney Spears’ crotch get out of a car shots are the same sites that will have the first “A Martian Ate My Baby: Lindsay Lohan Tells” and that’s when the evil space overlords will realise that they’ve mixed it with the wrong monkey boys.
You just can’t take on an interconnected society that is the evolutionary descendant of curiosity, mutual grooming and bum flashing.
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