My thanks again to all those who have dropped by since my
last letter in the spring of 2005. It seems there's been
something of a surge of readers, with over 5000 hits
occurring since then and that's about a third of the
total, since I went online eight years ago. Of course,
this is still very much one of the quieter backwaters of
the internet, but that's not such a bad place to be.
I made no significant additions to The Rivendale Review
in 2006 and those of you who dropped by more than once
might have been forgiven for thinking I'd lost interest
However, there was a lot of writing going on in the
background with a number of stories doing the
conventional rounds. The success rate was about one
percent and of course most stories eventually returned
home, covered in the dust of their travels, with little
to show for their trouble. A few of them were polished
up, cheered up, and given a slot here. The site also
underwent a full review in the summer - all the work
being checked, yet again, for those little typographical
errors that seem to elude the most careful scrutiny.
Certainly, if there is a disadvantage at all to self
publication, I mean apart from the lack of remuneration,
it is the lack of a second pair of eyes to scan the text
and point out one's mistakes.
And for the mistakes that no doubt remain - I apologise.
No matter how much checking I do though, nor how much I
play about with the presentation of the site, I'm aware
that The Rivendale Review is already looking a bit dated.
I'm conscious that online writers these days are more
likely to be bloggers, than custodians of a staid and
relatively static portfolio of personal scribblings. But
what can one do? No matter how interesting it might seem
to me, my life doesn't contain enough information to keep
even the most voyeuristic blog reader happy on a day to
day basis - at least not on the information I'd be
willing to divulge!
Perhaps its a middle aged thing, but I seem to measure my
life in months and years, rather than hours and days, and
unless I find myself suddenly posted to a war zone or
cast into a situation of historic import, where the
information is dynamic, transient and, most of all,
important, I shall not be taking up a blog any time soon.
It seems that without really trying, I am slipping into
the mould of an online Luddite. I still use Frontpage
Express for my web-construction, which now has the quaint
old clickety-click feel of an antique typwriter, when
compared with its more modern, flashier stable mates. I
was only recently persuaded to upgrade my occasionally
recalcitrant Windows 98 operating system for the already
obsolete XP, and to swap my quaint dial-up connection for
the much marketed and hugely expensive Broadband. So,
nowadays the PC goes online itself and interrupts me
mid-sentence, to say it has an urgent update it needs to
install - and all I want to do is bloody well finish the
sentence.
I suppose every generation must feel itself, for a while
at least, to be riding the wave of what is new and
exciting. But the pace of change is now such that I'm
wondering: are we still its master or are we already its
slave?
[All right, go on then, I'll install the update, whatever
it is!]
I can endlessly fiddle about with the means of delivery,
but that does not affect the content of my work. And if
at some point I find I must "upgrade" because
the means of delivering my words has become suddenly
obsolete, then are not my actual requirements becoming of
less importance than the pace of change itself?
[What's that update for then? What? I don't need to worry
about it? Just do it?]
Today's generation is the most interconnected in history.
Even a decade ago, the degree of interconnectedness we
have achieved now was unimaginable. Of course our teens
clutch their shiny little communicators like talismans,
and seem to exist only so they might respond to their
inboxes.To be disconnected by a flat battery or a broken
'phone for any length of time is to be erased from all
existence. Some might argue this interconnectedness
brings us closer, and the fact that I can text trivia to
an acquaintance on the other side of the world is somehow
evidence of an improvement in the way we live. But others
argue it actually separates us. I tend to agree with the
latter view: how many times have you chosen to e-mail
someone, rather than ring them up,... or actually go and
talk to them, face to face? Words are nothing unless
there's a human being behind them, and many of the
e-mails I have drafted read like the words of a machine,
my "self" being merely the channel, my fingers
the mechanism.
If you'll allow me a moment's reminiscence, about twenty
years ago, I was typing a novel into a Sinclair QL. If I
typed more than 1500 words the thing would crash, so I
had to break the text down into pieces that the system
could handle, and keep a rigorous check on the wordcount.
A moment's forgetfulness, or a sentence bashed out in an
enthusiastic flourish, and "zap", I Iost the
lot. Whole chapters disappeared like that and I had to
regurgitate them from memory, usually in the small hours
of the morning. But still, it was worth it because proper
PC's and word processors were horribly expensive in those
days, and the QL was my only way into the digital age.
Now that novel sits on a print-on-demand server, for
anyone to get at, and although it's hardly going to
change the world, I'm immensely pleased it's managed to
survive.
[And has now sold 8 copies!]
But before I get carried away by my mastery of
technology, I remind myself that Charles Dickens wrote in
longhand, with a pen. And his works have the considerable
merit of being more widely read than mine, even now after
over a century. I wonder if the same will be said, in a
hundred years time, about the blogatribes of today? Or
the Rivendale Review? One of Joseph Conrad's novels,
penned in the quieter moments of life onboard a
commercial sailing vessel, actually survived a shipwreck,
before going on to publication,... and that's certainly
more of a dramatic tale than saying: "My PC crashed,
but I managed to get the files back through DOS!"
Ah, well, you might say, the online word is disposable,
easily expressed, but somehow ephemeral, impermanent. We
write rubbish, but webmasters also lose interest, or die
and their websites wink out like stars gone supernova, as
webservers eventually clear out stuff that's not been
updated in a while. The digital age has meant that in
short, our words are more easily deleted now, that as
since time immemorial, only the most worthy will survive
in the long run. But actually what goes online, finds
ways of staying online. I was astonished to discover
recently a thing called the Wayback Machine that trawls
the web and archives the things its finds - not just
once, but time after time.
Even The Rivendale Review is archived there, in every
version I can remember, going back to the year 2000 -
you've only to type in the web address. You can look at
the stories I had online back then, and compare them with
the versions now. You can look at what's been added,
what's been taken away, and wonder what my motives were
for making those particular changes. You can look for
inconsistencies in my views expressed from one year to
the next, as I continually edit my online self. Of
course, no-one will be more surprised than yours truly if
some future historian actually subjects The Rivendale
Review to such scrutiny, but my point is that technology
seems to be outpacing us. It also seems intent on sucking
up our trivia, for a purpose of its own.
I see the image of a man gazing up into the night sky,
wondering about the stars. It is an image that could be
from any time, from now, to way back in prehistory. It is
the same man, and the only thing that defines his present
self from his past is the sophistication of his
technology. But that technology does not help him in his
simple stargazing, for this is a uniquely human activity.
Indeed, our technology these days seems to stand
increasingly apart, like a child that has outgrown us and
is bent on pursuing its own interests.
In fact it is no exaggeration to say that our technology
has already sprouted legs and begun to walk. As I write,
there is a copy of The Engineer magazine on my desk with
a strangely evocative photograph of a little humanoid
robot called Asimo, standing beside a very pretty
Oriental lady. If you don't know about Asimo, I suggest
you make enquiries, because this child sized robot is
currently causing quite a stir. Little Asimo is perhaps
the first indication that the vision of the Sci Fi
writer, Mr. Asimov, [ similarities in name apparently
coincidental ] and all those peculiar man/machine
paradoxes and conundrums he explored in his many
wonderful stories,... will have to be resolved, for real.
For me, as a human being, looking at this picture of
little Asimo, I can admire the ingenuity and the years of
development that have gone into its construction, but
perhaps paradoxically, I can also feel the point of our
own existence coming into sharper focus, and it is this:
we must not lose sight of our role simply as a vessel of
consciousness. Let little Asimo inherit the wealth of our
acquired knowledge, and let its progeny go on to be the
finest of our creations,... but let us not make the
mistake of identifying it with our most vital selves.
There was an article in another much respected
professional journal that spoke of how machines like
Asimo would one day be capable of consciousness, and I
shuddered, not because I suspected it was possible, but
because I found the very idea patently absurd and I was
reminded of how very far away my own [daytime] profession
has apparently departed from its innate senses. One day
little Asimo will manage to last more than an hour
between charges. One day it might gaze at the stars,
count their number and recall the name of every one. It
will know what category of star it is, and how far away,
to the nearest millimetre, what time it rises, what time
it sets. In a nanosecond, it will know all it needs to
know about any given situation.
But it will never simply wonder!
And that's the whole point.
Michael Graeme
March 2007
m_graeme@yahoo.co.uk
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