modern, past or future concept?

hello, this is my first blog so no sneering please...............

It all started as I approached 'london bridge' station; a total mish - mash of old and new. Underneath that dreary brown facade and the prevalence of decay leaking into your perception from all sides lies a vastly complicated sprawl of networking technology, from the main transport regulatory computer systems to the wi - fi sticker outside w,h,smith's. When looked at from a point of view that is to 'take stock' the result is mindblowing if not bewildering in complexity; but of course, 99.9 percent of the time it goes unnoticed and is taken for granted.
Watching the rush-hour commuters scurry through the station like so many rodents escaping the ultrasound box in your loft I found it ironic that, after a day's 'work' in a non-descript office processing data for their superiors and the company they run, these people were yet again being processed themselves through the equivalent of a pseudo-mechanic supercomputer as so many bits are forced through the route canals of a microchip, right down to the 'quick bite to eat and a newspaper before heading home'. All of course, accompanied by the brand new but completely overlooked technology of 'chip and pin'.
Lets take a brief look at that technology shall we? Sorry I mean the effect its had on people and its placement in the 'moden' world. Tell people to their face that they would have to adapt to continue comsuming by remembering a 4 digit number rather than signing their own name could theoretically cause a number of symptoms: that of injured pride when discovering that their own name just isn't good enough to justify their financial status anymore, that of either anger or resignment when shown that they are the one thing society compells them not to be; just another number, or even in extreme cases, that of protest against mistreatment of civil liberties when having received the explanation that 'this is yet another drastic security measure being taken on for their own protection'.
OK, now shove a keypad in front of them and ask them to 'tap in their PIN' - there you go! no questions asked, tap tap tap and off they go, not a nanosecond to evaluate the consequences of this new alien concept that has just landed squarely in the middle of their lives!
So, here's an example of how 'the next big leap in technology' never gets accepted at face value at first, but later on becomes a part of the daily routine by slowly creeping in: Nobody really took a concious decision to 'today i'm going to start using the internet' did they? Do you remember the first time you went online? I remember having the concept explained to me by a computer geek in marseille while in an "internet cafe" ( i put in inverted comma's as the description of the location has nothing to do with the cybercafes of today; this was literally a wine bar with an ibm 133mhz in what used to be a phone booth somewhere towards the rear accompanied thankfully by a large flowery sofa), and I watched on, interested but utterly clueless to the whole debacle, perfunctorily nodding my head while he opened me my first hotmail account ( which I never used) and explained me the concept of email. Well I was never an avid user of the post office, so the whole concept of writing letters to my friends via a computer never really sunk in, not even when an old pal patrick ( the creator of the 'rave board game') yelled his email at me at the top of his voice while passing me by squashed into the throng at a notting hill carnival in 1994. So i walked out of there with the impression that this 'new fangled internet thing' was nothing more than a place where computer nerds sent plans of world domination to each other while catching up on the latest in extreme porn.
By the way, don't get me wrong, i'm not technophobic in the slightest, in fact i'm an electronic music producer and have had my hands on 'tekno toys' since age 15.
I'm really not sure how internet entered my life: it just ended up being one of those things you need to be able to get your hands on in order to make things work in your day to day life. The one revelation I'll never forget though, is the way that via a few emails, members of our collective, and I were, within weeks of this happening, on a plane to israel to spend 2 weeks all expenses paid, holidaying and playing music in parties over there. Thats when it finally became important, yet by that point it was no longer being perceived by me as this 'brand new technology', oh it was still modern, but it was something that felt like it had always been there, and was again now appropriated to the part of the mind that considers things, normal, humdrum, and again , taken for granted.
The majority of people it seems, when confronted with a big 'vision of the future' such as,
' one day we'll all be living on other planets and we'll use space travel to get about'
or
' computers will play an integral part in our lives and its best to get to know how to work one now'
The first reaction is inevitably one of denial. Our daily routines are already packed enough with relentless tedium to have to learn a new skill that in general can be perceived as a 'long way round' to achieving once again quite mundane tasks like shopping, booking tickets and staying in touch and its the mundanity of these tasks that are , in the end, the pieces of the puzzle that make you unconciously adapt to a life in this world with these 'new concepts' in place. A fabulous 'ficticious' portrayal of this can be found when watching a recent james bond film where not only is M now played by a lady, her office is adorned with full wall size video screens depicting many simultaneous snippets of classified information, but somehow they manage to blend in seamlessly with the more traditional decor such as bookcases, victorian desks , and of course, well stocked drinks cabinets.
As I stood on a platform at London Bridge it really hit me today for the first time the reason why we seem to advance as a society at a snails pace. Despite the fact that future generations may look upon us as denizens of the 'waste era' ( thank you iain banks for that) theres something beautiful, romantic , and rather comforting about the mix of old and new we are experiencing today: Its nothing like the antiseptic future our science fiction purveyors led us to believe ( george lucas is of course exempt from this issue as the film 'thx1138' was life in a white walled city where everybody had shaved heads took drugs , didn't have sex, and wore labcoats and jumpsuits, whereas , no matter how futuristic the technology looked in 'star wars', everything had that beaten up , battle scarred, dilapidated look that gave the impression that this was junk hundreds of years old.) Who needs space travel when you've got mobile phones?? Which do you prefer, trepanace or nurofen? But above all, there is a luxury I can now revel in thanks to another mind boggling but mundane 'new technology', and that is the one where grab my phone, switch to camera mode, cavort around like a fool, and video message my mother, or other close friend from a place I'll probably visit only once in my life.
51m0n