Now a barely-there generation is starting to get nostalgic about the 90s, and acting like it was just 10 years of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and My So Called Life, rather than full of the horribly enduring long-sideburn-ed crimes of fashion that Liam ‘Pretty Green’ Gallagher continues to peddle on Carnaby Street. As far as my school photos are concerned this was the decade that gave birth to fleeces and combat trousers, to haircuts that looked like a spider was sitting on the front of the head. Others feel differently, people remember things in broad strokes, and it’s unlikely that we all have the same memories. As time progresses, the events of our own lifetimes get mangled and eaten up by history, as the population as a whole decides what things mattered, and will survive through nostalgia. Not just in pop music and TV, but in world events and politics too.

One current, quite contentious product of nostalgia is technology, and in particular Apple’s, reliance on ‘Skeuomorph”s in their operating systems. In order to design products for the ever widening scope of Apple consumers, they keep referencing textures and patterns from the oldey-worldey ‘real’ world in order to create interfaces as easy to understand as possible for the modern user. Since iMacs started appearing in homes 15 years ago, they’ve gone from the bright expensive aesthetic of brushed chrome, reflecting the public’s expectation from their ‘midi-systems’ of the 90s, to more artsy canvas textures, and now seem to have settled on the very edge of the design industy’s taste with Find My Friend’s leather bound book effect.

Maybe people’s current obsession with these faults is, like my own perception of the 90s, a skewed personal memory of the past that ignores the wider picture. In the last 5 years Apple have continually developed, simplified and combined the operating system across all platforms, and yet because the skeuomorphs are the more visually disruptive the design community is only remembering the more visible, bad parts; the ‘Kriss Kross’ Find Your Friend user interface, and the ‘Babylon Zoo’ Game Centre. Anti-skeuomorph has become design shorthand, the go-to opinion for those who’ve read a book on how to use Photoshop and a couple of blog posts on trends to avoid. It is the ‘I hate Comic Sans’ of 2013.

Many articles have been written about how terrible this direction Apple are going in is, and the main chap apparently responsible for these decisions has left the company. The strong decision of the design community is that ‘Retro design is crippling innovation’. There is even a blog that hilariously annotates the design thinking around some of the app stores worst culprits.

The thing is, if you look toward the high street, you’d get a widely opposing view to the public’s relationship with old fashioned aesthetics and textures. Anyone who hasn’t noticed the boom in anything retro, vintage or otherwise oldey worldey must have been living under a rock these past ten years. (Which is ironic, because that in itself is a design paradigm from way back in Jesus times.) And not just the Paloma Faith’s of this world who apparently favour a needless Elizabethan ruff, or the chap who I’ve seen about town on a Penny Farthing, literally everything anyone wears or has in their home uses some kind of ‘physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques’. Coats with buttons that do nothing, pockets that are really just slits, seams that are purposefully printed on, epaulettes, frills, button holes, fucking BOBBLE HATS. And in the home, breadbins painted to look like they’re wooden, fridges decorated like a wooden door, lights that look like lamps.

The design community is probably as cynical about high street shops as they are about needlessly fanciful interfaces, which is a bit strange as most of the designers I know are quite considered with how they dress. They might say that all these accouterments above are needless style, and that the fashion industry is just re-hashing things for financial gain rather than anything needing to have a purpose. But these stylistic elements do have a function; they define the function of the clothing, and therefore the intended perception of the person, in the minutaie of how they’re constructed.

There is a great line in recent Sci-Fi film Looper. Jeff Daniels from Dumb and Dumber, the head of the big far-future gang is questioning why recent-future Joseph Gordon Levitt wears a tie, or ‘cravat’ as he first calls it, so unfamiliar he is with them. In the far future human beings have lost this obsession with the past. “What is it? It doesn’t *do* anything!”. Maybe this was thrown in because after decades of Bill and Ted and Marty McFly getting the near-future so clearly wrong by basing it on a hyper-version of what we have currently, the safer stylistic decision is to say that future-folk simply aren’t bothered with referencing the past. It’s a nice idea, but wouldn’t work in practice. We wouldn’t want to go and tell people to dress functionally and minimally, or soon enough we’d all be walking around in onesies, with a grow bag hanging below our face and a potty strapped to our bottoms. Or we’d shop at Next. **Shudders**

Software is of course not clothes, but you can’t deny that iPhones are lifestyle objects, becoming as desirable and as much of signifier of taste (and wealth) as an expensive coat or car these days. As the App market becomes more competitive, the decision making process as to which app to pick over another is going to involve the things attractiveness and similarity to things the user is comforted by. Minimal Windows 8 interfaces, currently held aloft as the best alternative to Apple’s Skeuomasturbation, are beautiful, but not noticeable to the average non-designer. Of course the best design goes un-noticed, but discretion isn’t going to push you into parting with 69p the next time you’re downloading an app.

I’m aware that I’m muddling in ‘skeuomorphs’ with basically ‘all elaborate stylish design’, but that seems to be the way the argument is being made by others. In citing the worst examples, voices in the industry seem hell bent on banishing a certain style from our devices, which I believe would be detrimental to the app market. I’m in no way saying that using a denim, canvas or wooden texture arbitrarily is always the answer, but sometimes it is.

Designers may claim that iPhones should be used solely as functional tools, but who hasn’t moved icons around on their home-screen so that they make nice colourful patterns? Plus, Letterpress might be regarded as a great game due to its wonderfully minimal interface, but the icon is an absolute disgrace, so it’s not making it to the front screen of my device any time soon.

McDonalds is currently top of the list of many Olympic sponsors Londoners are angry with. Obviously, people are against them from a health perspective due to McDonald’s ruthless advertising of chips literally counter-acting the chances of any Britons winning any medals, and are campaigning for some kind of boycott. Meanwhile, so fastidious is the Olympic Delivery Authority that they intend to have ‘brand officers’ marching the streets of London making sure pubs don’t allow five glasses to be arranged in the shape of the Olympic rings. Just last week there was outrage that McDonalds apparently has a monopoly on chips. According to LOCOGs guidelines, you can’t even link to their site if it’s not to say something positive. The bastards.

So associating chips and eyelids with running really fast is quite the challenge for an advertising agency, who instead choose to ignore the McNuggets, McFlurries or even any of their restaurants and try to just hose us down with sugary Olympic joy. The end result is the kind of advertising so transparent in its intention, when I see it I can’t see anything but the mechanics by which it was created. I don’t see a recognisable young mother cheering someone on with toddlers on her lap or a group of colleagues following the event during lunch, I see the whirring cogs of advertising executives sitting about brainstorming a way of polishing a meaty turd with Olympic lacquer.

So this is my voice-over script for the advertising agency brainstorm session. You’ll have to imagine the background music, which will be a slowed-down acoustic cover of ‘You’re the best around’ from the end of Karate Kid by that chap who sang ‘Girl on the Platform’ for Match.com.

The Double-Cheek Kisser, The Compliment Fisher,

Doubter, Shouter, Folk Music Cover-Version Scouter,

Diversity Advisor, Account Handler Miser,

The Social Media Aggregator, Client Ego Masturbator,

The Preener, The Over-Keen-er, The ‘Let’s Just Make Their Logo ‘Green-er’,

The ‘Worked There As a Student Frier’, Media Buyer, “If People Ate Only This Food Wouldn’t They Die?”-er,

The ‘We Need To Think About The End User’, The Awards Do Last Night Substance-Abuser,

The ‘Still Off Their Tits’, Strategists, The ‘Hey, They Sell Salads Too!’ Apologists,

The Intern Who Thinks Everything Is ‘Awesome’-er, The Brand Exclusion Zone Enforcer,

The ‘I’m Sure They Have A Healthy Options Menu’ , The Social Media Guru,

The Brainstorm Lunch Platter Hoggers, Official Bloggers, Creative Idea Dead-Horse Floggers,

Coffee-break Defectors, HD Digital Projectors, “I’ll Make It All Slow-mo And Soft-Focus” Art Directors,

And for The Neurotics, the Pat-On-The-Back Trophies for their long cab journeys home.

The Daily Mail: Sherlock and the case of nudity before 9pm.

Far from mentioning anything like the level of enjoyment that led The Independent to describe it as “shockingly good TV”, or for it to occupy almost all of the trending topics on Twitter during it’s run-time, the Mail reacts to nothing but the (non-frontal) nudity in the programme of Sherlock’s new love interest Irene Adler. The paper then publishes screen-grabs of the shocking nudity, just to make sure its readership know exactly what they are referring to.

Also of brilliant hypocritical note is that Twitter trends are not mentioned, yet individual tweets are quoted as some measure of the public’s reaction. This despite the service being regularly dismissed by their ‘Top Scientists’ as a frivolous toy by which #brokenbritain can only find out what Steven Fry had for breakfast.

I saw recently that the paper has a corrections department, through which they can quietly apologise when Christmas hasn’t been cancelled in some schools, or when the EU doesn’t ban bendy bananas etc. So, assuming the publication of the images alongside details of how dangerously shocking they were to be some kind of mistake, I sent them this email:

Hello,

I think there is inaccuracy in your article about the BBC’s Sherlock nudity scenes. You claim the scene was outrageous for being shown pre-watershed, but someone seems to have accidentally posted full screen grabs onto your website! Also, on further inspection I found at least half a dozen more images in the right hand side of the ‘outrageous’ story that appear to be content from your site showing semi-naked celebrities!

I was pretty disgusted to hear that the Sherlock scenes went out pre-9pm. Could you please explain what prevention you’re making to insure that none of your semi-pornographic images are seen before that time too? I assume you’re currently working on some kind of paywall, or at least a log-in to prevent innocent readers from seeing such shocking nudity, such is your mission to rid Great Britain of such filth.

Please could you let me know whether you decided to:
a – Correct the use of ‘outrage’ with the more honest ‘enjoyed looking at pictures of naked women under the guise of being outraged so as to maintain one’s perceived moral backbone whilst actually being wholly naturally aroused’.
b – Stop taking scandalous paparazzi shots of celebrities on beaches and promoting them constantly around your site.
c – Build a paywall for your site.

Thanks!

They responded with this:

Thank you for your letter. We would not necessarily agree that the images on our website are, as you claim, ‘semi-pornographic’. We are forwarding your letter and remarks about a paywall to our website editor. In the meantime, if you were, as you say, ‘pretty disgusted’ to learn that the Sherlock scenes were screened before 9pm, perhaps you should address your comments to the BBC.

Happy New Year.

Touché. We appear to have reached a disingenuous stalemate.

Losing my edge

I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from Goldsmiths and from the Royal College.
But I was there.

I was there in 1998.
I was there when the first iMac was unveiled in Cupertino.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose mouse-clicks I hear when I’m reading my analytics.
I’m losing my edge to the Dribble users who can tell me every great designer from 1962 to 1978.
To the Threadless community with little vector illustrations and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered nineties.

I’m losing my edge.
But I was there.

I was there at Tonic when they didn’t have a door on their toilets in a party on Shoreditch High Street.
I was trying to find bottles of beer in the paddling pool with much patience.
I was there when Zoë Bather started up her own agency.
I told her, “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make a dime.”
I was there.
I was the first guy presenting about User Experience to the advertising companies.
I presented it at Digit.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.

I’ve never been wrong.
I used to work in a reprographics house.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there on TVGoHome with Nathan Barley
I was there in Mother Bar, during the great Photoshop tennis matches.
I woke up naked on Hoxton Square in 1998.

But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas who went to colleges that actually teach you practical skills and whose tutors actually use the internet.
And they’re actually really, really nice.

I’m losing my edge.

I heard you have a Tumblr of every great design done by anyone. Every great site by Razorfish. All the Hi-Res sites. I heard that you have a CD-ROM of every seminal interactive piece by Tomato, and another Zip Disk full of work by David Carson.

I hear you’ve bought Omnigraffle, and a load of sticky notes, and you’re throwing your computer out of the window because you want to make something real. You want to work for IDEO.

I hear that you and your design collective have given up on visual design, and are now doing UX.
I hear that you and your design collective have given up on UX and are now doing Service Design.

I hear everybody on your Linked In is more relevant than everybody on my Linked In.

CD-ROMS, Eye-Blasters, Bert is Evil, Micro-sites, Webmasters, Flash, Jazz Drives, Newstoday, Animated GIFS, Adaptive Colour Palettes, Second Life, Neville Brody, Napster, All your base are belong to us, G4 Cubes, Mr Ts Balls, Friendster, Paint Shop Pro, Blogs.

You don’t know what you really want.

Obviously we work in the internet, and those are expressions about the internet. I do get the joke, if it’s intended to be one. But do we really need to mention references to things we work with at every stage of our working day? Or are the people using the expressions just showing off about the fact they work for a technology company, like it’s 1999 again and they want to come to work in a long dark coat and shitty sunglasses every day and pretend they’re in the Matrix?

Is this bizarre mixture of business jargon-meets-workplace terminology restricted to web companies, or is it the same in other industries? Do bakers describe any longterm financial investments as “waiting for the dough to rise”? Does a cheese maker who is going to have to cut his worse staff say he’s “separating the curds from the whey”? Would a dentist with a hectic diary ever ask his assistant to “rinse and spit out some of the plaque”, or have a business model called ‘Open. Wide’?

If my co-workers are going to continue this annoying trend I’d like to make my own suggestions for additions that at least make me laugh. Whilst it does make me feel a little like I’m in some Dilbert/Nathan Barley mash-up, I do love a good pun. So I’m going to try and add the following to my workplace parlance:

“Let’s torrent this sometime”
We should have a brainstorm.

“Feeling a bit rough this morning, I should have held Shift when I got up”
I feel fragile and need to be considered in ‘safe mode’.

“We’re going to have to Force Quit”
There are going to be Compulsory redundancies.

“Let’s Exposé this”
I want to see everything we’re doing right now.

“We should probably start a Google Wave about this”
Sarcasm. Your idea is really shit and no-one wants to hear about it.

“We’re going to add you to the Keychain”
You are deemed trustworthy enough that you’re about to be told the company secrets.

“Let’s do some Private Browsing”
I want to have sex with you and for you to forget it ever happened.

If anyone has any more, feel free to add in the comments.

So let’s take a little look into what the next ten years will bring us, using whatever may be your time-machine of choice; Delorean, Phone-booth, Time-gate, Stasis Leak or Hot Tub.

Music and Film

Media in the 2010s continues the same self-referential path it’s been treading for the past 30 years, just to a further extent. In 2012, Gone With The Wind is ‘re-imagined’ as a Jennifer Lopez comedy vehicle. With a modern injection of sass ‘I Give a Damn 3D’ adds a fist fight to the ending, and quickly becomes the most downloaded film from ‘Richard & Judy’s iPlayer Club’, who say “Frankly my dear, it’s damned brilliant!” Other classics in the pipeline to be remade in 2020 include Epic Movie, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and a fifth Hulk.

The 80s quickly passes as the nostalgic era of choice in 2011, to return in 2013. In 2012 the ‘loop of retro’ becomes ever smaller, as a different decade is celebrated and then derided within each calendar month. January sees a revival in 90s Thrillers, February has 50s musicals and March is all about 80s sex comedies. This means many films can find a different audience depending on the time of year it is released. When The A-Team 2 opens on February 25th, it is panned. A-Team 3, released in October, manages to tap into the 80s tea-time TV revival of that month, and is praised for its finely crafted irony.

Music too becomes victim to this new whirlwind of self-referentiality. Kanye West’s 2015 album ‘AWESOME’ is the not the first to use samples from his own songs, but it is the first to take them from earlier in the same verse. Album closer ‘I am (I am {I AM}) Brilliant (Brilliant {BRILLIANT})’ is really just the same line looped and recorded from itself again and again for 6 minutes, quite like the sound you get when someone phones up a radio station and doesn’t turn their own set down.

In 2017 a survey shows that 96% of youngsters believe that the entire output of music leading up to the year 2000 was produced by either Madonna, The Beatles or Johnny Cash. In 2019, the soundtrack to Beatles Rock Band 5 is named ‘Best Album/Ringtone of All Time’ by Rolling Stone magazine.

In 2013, after the release of their fourth self published free-to-download album ’4.9P/PER/KB HA HA’ the music buying public are shocked to find out that Radiohead part own the Internet, after someone figures out the code hidden within their album title. It is revealed they make money for every download simply through the cut they take from ISPs they bought with the profits from Creep in the mid-90s, and that their anti-commercialism stance has just been a meticulously constructed act. The online furore continues through 2014, until some points out that obviously they’re still making money for every angry tweet, email and blog post, so everyone just stops mentioning it.

Technology

Newspaper sales continue to fall in the 2010s, as free online sources mature to replace them. In 2013, the last print paper The Daily Mail stops publication, blaming its steady decline in sales on ‘hoodies with mobile phones’. The Peoples Paper, the online hub of pooled ‘citizen journalism’, announces its passing in October that year with the headline ‘Nws papers R finally daed!’(sic). Some other publications do continue in online form, with paid content available behind a paywall. ‘Tom Cruise News’, the leading Scientologist publication, offers 1 day access for £1.50, a weeks for £5 and the a ‘Premium News’ service with the answers to life’s greatest questions for just £50 a month.

In 2013 the first person becomes married over Twitter, and by August 2014 their story is made into a movie. In September that year someone transcribes the movie into text speak in order to retell the story in its original format. In 2015 15,235 people propose to their partners by simply Retweeting dialogue from their story.

By 2016 the online trend is very much on keeping things to yourself. After the ‘Summer of Unemployment’ in 2015, caused by someone exposing the huge amount of incriminating sackable evidence employees had posted on Facebook in the 2000s, youngsters returned to being shuffling lonely individuals, keeping diaries and being fearful of others. Fortunately, MySpace returns to the social media fray offering an application that let’s you save your diary online. Unfortunately, they then sell a generation of youngster’s fears and worries to advertisers in 2019.

By 2020, 93% of businesses use ‘Google New Wave’, and social networking has regressed back to people updating their Friends Reunited profiles. Those with a passion for all things ‘retro’ often meet up with each other in pubs and restaurants, engaging in conversation face to face.

Whilst a bad decade for many large tech companies, Apple continues its growth in the consumer market. In 2012 it finally figures out an effective solution for their long suffering Apple TV service. After lengthy deals with content suppliers, ground-breaking ‘Arial’ technology allows seamless play of licenced content in a linear format. Steve Jobs announces the service in a lavish presentation while hanging from wires between the pyramids in Egypt. “Boom! Live streaming video that plays all day. You can literally just turn it on and see what’s playing! We call it ‘TV’!” By 2019 they’ve shifted 5 million of the £499 devices and the world’s living rooms are changed forever.

Fashion

After the High Street crash of 2014, and with no shops around to sell clothes, the whole fashion industry collapses. With no new clothes available, the fashion conscious are forced to exchange and swap between each other, as every single item of clothing becomes classed as ‘vintage’. With items in such high demand, and supplies obviously limited, clashes over 2006 American Apparel leggings, or a 2009 pair of Gap jeans are not uncommon. By 2018, women wrestling over 1950s brouches becomes a spectator sport in West London.

Most of the high street shop spaces are quickly taken over as ‘pop-up’ bars and restaurants, and filled with snooty well-dressed hipsters. To some this makes them indistinguishable from their former purposes as fashion retailers, and many window shoppers remain unaware of any change to the high street for another couple of years.

The ongoing repurposing of buildings into hip temporary bars continues to infect the East End of London. By 2013 most launderettes, dentists and pharmacists host fashion shows, DJ nights and knitting evenings. In 2014 new London Mayor Will Young decrees Old Street and onwards to be just one permanent Private View, and that cheap red wine shall be provided on tap for those with a Hackney postcode.

Or decide for yourself, by watching the whole thing here.

The problem is, internet activism is so much easier than ‘real’ activism. It takes barely any effort to tick a box and register your support to a campaign, or to ‘retweet’ someone else’s observation or damning statement. Yet we’re supposed to consider the huge amount of statistics these polls, lists and virtual signatures amass to as worthy as a traditional march or picketing would have been. In the olden times, people really had to make an effort to stand up for things. Would a modern day Emily Pankhurst have really won the vote for women from a Facebook Group? Would Martin Luther King have had as much success in his fight for civil rights with a particularly memorable hashtag for his Twitter campaign?

Twitter is certainly the online campaigner’s service of choice right now, and the press are always keen to throw in anything gleaned from the site as a measure of the cultural zeitgeist. But isn’t a lot of this micro-moaning just a little predictable? As a quick scan through the Trending Topics on any given week shows, Twitter has a heavily liberal bias. Every week there’s some outrage about Sky News, Rupert Murdoch or Fox News. After a while campaigns just blur into one, and it’s hard to see the serious from the frivolous. Someone a bit racist, bigoted, homophobic, or just mental, has said something that’s quite rightly outraged a big chunk of people. And the big (organic, carbon-neutral) pitchfork wielding Twitter-mob descend upon those persons, sending around implicating quotes and feverishly typed quips, until they get some kind of apology.

But it’s very unlikely any of this virtual campaigning is ever actually going to take down some huge empire. The Daily Mail is going to continue to spout barely-masked racism for many years to come, because much of its readership are bare-faced racists. The opinion of a group of web-savvy campaigners isn’t really something they’re that concerned with. Most Daily Mail readers have been brainwashed to believe the Internet in general is evil anyway, and wouldn’t point their browser Twitter-wards for fear of catching cancer.

At some point all these continuous battles become ‘us vs them’, and a whole lump of the internet just becomes understood by non-users as simply a place for complaining. It belittles any real campaigns for things where there can be some kind of real world resolution. Why is it such a great idea for the masses to control how every little decision is made? We don’t research, we don’t gain a broad perspective around a subject. Instead we look for easy villains to blame, and take the moral high-ground. David Cameron talks about his ‘big society’ and how he’ll ask people how they want the country to be run on every detail. I give six months before we see public hanging brought back and Jeremy Clarkson elected as Supreme Leader.

Online campaigns all seem to follow a similar pattern. As online outrage grows, a cyber ‘chinese whisper’ takes place as quotes are linked and misquoted and sent out again around the internet. People get excited, and seem to enjoy the moral outrage and sense of being part of ‘something’ more than the effort they’re willing to make to find out if they’re right. It’s almost like they seem to find some kind of pleasure from the original offensive comment, as it gets to validate their want to be morally superior. The mob starts to notice it’s own size, which reinforces its conviction that it’s doing the right thing. The outrage officially becomes a ‘campaign’. Supported by the angry pack behind them, individuals start to act just as aggressively and amorally as those they’re fighting against.

Back when Jan Moir was being criticised for her piece implicating homosexuality as the cause for Stephen Gately’s death, she refused to own up and admit the nastiness of her article. Perhaps she felt slightly justified, and not at all apologetic, partly because of the similarly confusing morals of some of the campaigners who were attacking and calling her a ‘filthy slag’? A lot of people call this modern form of News-gathering ‘Citizen Journalism’. That would make us, the internet gatherers, the worst journalists known to man. Overly excitable and prone to suggestion from anyone we know and like, with a personal vested interest in anything we report, unwilling to accept any other point of view.

All this internet chat gives us is a vague measure of the levels of excitement on a subject. It’s just indicative of how much people are talking about something. Twenty years ago you wouldn’t gave taken the observation that a lot of people were moaning about work around the water-cooler as some indication that something had to be changed. But today a representative of that group might march up to the boss with a record of their chatter, demanding something is done. “8 whole people said 400 negative things about you, our boss, at 3.15 today! We demand you are fired!”

If Internet campaigning does have its place, it’s around the more frivolous aspects of society. A few years ago it was a Facebook campaign that brought back Wispas after all, and they’re absolutely delicious. We should perhaps leave it at that. Chocolate bars are about as much responsibility the internet protesters should be given. There’s no emotion involved, and nobody was trying to push their own biased agenda. The worst we could do is drop some of it on our clothes, or mistake it for poo.

I post to Twitter, which is linked to my Facebook status, about once every couple of days. I write utter nonsense generally. Jokes I’m trying to tell, or observations of life unfolding around me. Sometimes I joke about things I know at least some of my followers/friends will disagree with, because I enjoy being a bit provocative. Then I get surprised when they respond annoyed, and deny any provocation. But, I do have some loose rules around what I post, and by which i judge what other people post. I generally don’t mention anything overly personal, intentionally obscure or exclusive to certain groups of friends. I don’t make direct comments to specific people, and certainly not to my girlfriend. My online behaviour almost mirrors my Real Life behaviour in social situations; Sometimes reserved, with frequent bouts of angry swearing and attempts to offend whole chunks of society through ridiculous sweeping generalisations. But across platforms at least I am consistent.

When I was a teenager I was much less aware of how to condone myself socially, even moreso than today. I would wear my heart on my sleeve, act with incredible self-righteousness on subjects I knew nothing about, and say lots of other naive embarrassing things that other not-fully-formed people do between the ages of 13 and 19. I was the kind of idiot who’d compose bad poetry in the back of his log book at school. You get the picture. It doesn’t bear thinking what a tit I’d have made of myself if there was such a thing as Facebook/Twitter/My Space when I was that age. As many of us, I remember leaving parties in my teenage years a little worse for wear and emotionally distraught. If I had such an outlet who knows what unbearable gut-wrenching cringeworthyness I would have blurted half drunk to my idiot school friends and acquaintances. It would almost certainly have been in the third person, brimming with sarcasm, and would definitely have name-checked at least two or three of the other partygoers. ‘Toby is just fine that no-one asked him how he was after failing his Driving Theory Test, and hopes Sebastian and Timothy really enjoyed chatting up the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen on Saturday night.’ Eurrgh.

Having said that, there are plenty of well-adjusted grown ups amongst my Facebook friends who are still prone to the typically teenage ‘cry for help’. Statuses like ‘Feeling sad…’, ‘Well that’s three years of my life wasted…’, generally people who use more than their fair share of ellipses, are all examples of these adolescent yearnings for attention. Maybe those people are just more in touch with their youth than I. There I go again with the ridiculous broad generalisations…

How would I, or teenagers today, cope with the future realisation that these comments are permanent and entirely searchable? We all know that people search potential suitors on the internet before dates, and that some employers do likewise before job interviews. What’s the point in lying so elequently in your CV if once they get it they’re able to access the uncensored truth so easily? Forget three years as assistant manager in a local record shop. they’ll be much more concerned with all the Internet activity they have of you bragging about being so ‘mashed’ every weekend.

Plus, it’ll stay findable throughout your whole life, by anyone who cares to look. A lot is said about how much information these huge faceless organisations hold on us, but it doesn’t really bother me that much. I’ve always assumed there are loads of horrible intrusive files kept on each and every one of us, such was my interest in paranoid 1970s sci-fi films growing up. That they’d keep ones on me specifically I’d actually be more flattered about than frightened. No, what scares me is the thought of my future grandchildren having uncensored access to every pithy remark and conversation I had in my youth. My generation, in general, still respects the elderly. They survived world wars, lived thriftily to provide for their offspring and deserve to spend their final years in peace and happiness. We were bought up in the extravagant 80s, with luxuries our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt of, and our trail of internet archived material would reflect this indulgence. Children aren’t going to respect us in our old age when they know the truths behind our vague sage advice.

“What did you do in the (second Gulf) War grandpa?”
“Well little Tobetta, it was difficult times, and people made difficult choices as to how they thought they could contribute.”
**Pats Tobetta on the head**
“But according to your Xbox statistics you spent those six years around the war playing Call of Duty 4 online? And I read all those jokes you’d make about 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan decades later. How was that contributing anything even slightly worthwhile?”
(Uncomfortably long pause)
**Pats Tobetta on head again**

Thanks to the permanent binds these services create, a youngster leaving school these days is less likely to experience the same exciting feeling of escape that I did. They’re going to be in virtual contact with everyone from their class from the first term they’re away at university, a constant reminder of the previous self you’re pretending not to be to your new peers. Friends at school have known you through the most intense and dislikable time of your life. No matter how nice they are, it’s impossible to re-invent yourself when they’re still about. Where’s the ten year recovery period that most decent minded people need in order to fully rid themselves of the horrors of a small-town comprehensive school?

‘Toby just loves La Jetée. A sublime masterpiece. Less a film, more slowly-moving poetry.’
Comment – “Was it slow moving like that time you shit yourself doing the 400 metres after we’d eaten all those Cherry Tarts we found in McCluskies store cupboard? “I can’t run, it’s dripping down my leg” LOLOLOL!”

Maybe young peoples attitude to these services will wain as the years go past, as they experience the potential pitfalls themselves. Or perhaps someone will invent another hugely popular service that goes through the Internet burying your embarrassing past. Who knows, in five years time we might all be cowering behind individual pay-walls, if current big media trends keep spreading. Anyway, back to me talking to the teenager. As I said, he was quite unlike the stereotypes the Daily Mail breed about his ilk. Perhaps my reliance on broad generalisations is something I should try to rid from my personality, both online and in real life, in the coming years. We had had a good chat, and I doubt I’d have been able to have done that with someone my age when I was his. Mind you, he did stab me at the end, and filmed himself doing so on his mobile phone. Go to Youtube and see it for yourself. No need to rush, it’ll be there forever.

It goes back to that old adage: If you’re not doing anything wrong, what have you got to worry about? We don’t assume some chap with a balaclava just has issues with his acne, and similarly I wouldn’t think that whatever you’re secretly reading on the bus is anything less than the written equivalent of an act of terrorism. Or Alex Reid’s autobiography.

By masking the activity you’re currently doing, these e-readers make every user’s actions seem alike. You might be on the bus pondering the latest pseudo-science fiction by some charismatic new media entrepreneur, but if you’re doing that through an iPhone interface you’ll be grouped in with anyone else using one, checking Facebook or playing Flight Control.

And not just on buses, in pubs too. It used to be alright for a lone drinker to browse the paper at the bar before his friend arrives. Now even if you’re reading New Scientist online you’re judged as to be repeatedly checking your phone for signal, and pestering said friend with angry messages.

iPhones, and the E-Books that supersede them, should display publicly the high-brow things you’re consuming, perhaps in a timely Wordle that floats above your head. Or the device just needs rebranding, to be seen as a credible source for culture and intelligent discussion, as well as a convenient phonebook of pizza delivery companies. How about an attachment for resting one’s pipe on, or one to hold an apple? You know, stuff that clever people do while reading.

At times when I actually am checking my texts or emails, it should point out I’m not browsing the web, cheating in the pub quiz I’m currently competing in.

The easiest win iPhones could have would be to at least make it clear we’re not all taking surreptitious photos from behind them. I know simpler mobile phones have to make that annoying ‘click’, in order to prove we’re not all paedophiles, but would prefer something more explicit (obvious, not dirty).

I want a bright LED display that announces my innocence to those around me. Just not when I’m doing something I don’t want other people to know about. Media consumption transparency is all very well and good, just not when I’m looking at pornography. With multiple-tasking coming in iPhone 4.0 I guess I could open up my Business Inspiration app first, and hide the porn behind that; a new media evolution of reading Playboy behind a copy of the Financial Times. Whilst smoking a pipe.