A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: ‘When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.’
The great Douglas Adams believed technology always arouses one of three different reactions in us, depending on our age at the time it first appeared. So anything invented before our tenth birthday leaves us unfazed — it’s mere infrastructure (just as my daughters are no more excited by Sky+ than I am by plumbing). By contrast the stuff invented in the 30 years after our tenth birthday, well that’s real Technology, and an endless source of awe and fascination (the way we still enjoy a minor thrill each time we go abroad and find our mobile still works). Last are the things invented after we hit 40.
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