Today's web-savvy, smartphone-saturated, Twittertastic world leaves some people feeling out of touch – while others refuse to let technology rule their lives, writes ROSITA BOLAND
Frank McGarry
FRANK McGARRY, who lives alone in Longford town, is none too fond of his electronic gizmos. “I had a computer, but I sold it five months ago. I had it for two and a half years. I don’t like computers. They’re too much like hard work and too hard on the eyes. Now, if I really need the internet, I could always book an hour in the library for free – but I haven’t been there in years.”
McGarry has a phone, but not a smartphone. “I don’t want one. I think it’s too much information overload. The only information I want is the news, and I don’t even watch the news; I just put Aertel on the television. For one story on the news you get about 20 different shades of opinion, and it’s overkill.”
Neither is he interested in social media. “If I meet people in person, that’s great, but I don’t like all that information on Twitter and Facebook. I did have a look at them both, and I guess I’m too private a person to make myself so available to other people.”
McGarry pays bills by direct debit, rather than online. He used email a few times in the past, but no longer does so. “I send text messages though – I suppose that’s like electronic mail.”
He prefers to do his business via the phone. “I know sometimes when you’re ringing companies and organisations, they keep you waiting ages, but even at that, the phone for me is still more practical than email.”
McGarry is 53, and says that if he was 20 years younger he’d have “a completely different attitude”. He has no intention of getting another computer. “It’s a retro way of life. I feel like I’m living in the 1970s or the 1980s.”
Eileen Battersby
I’VE NEVER BEEN able to yodel; I mean, really yodel. As for tap dancing, not so hot at that either, and, well, I never mastered the highly useful skill of knitting. Pity that because I do love socks and change mine about five times a day.
My apple pie is only good, not great, although my chocolate-fudge brownies have been described as dangerous (I take that as a compliment). Yet, that small triumph aside, there is an embarrassing array of things, including superior table manners, that I never got around to learning, but nowadays in our tough, just-you-try-to-surprise-me society, everything has lost its shock value. One little confession, though, still guarantees an element of wide-eyed wonder and it’s not revealing a liking for squirrel soup (yuck) – it’s the inability to text.
Admit to that one and people will gaze as you so deeply it is as if they are trying to assess what trauma has caused this. You could be staggering under the weight of two enormous sacks of stones and no one will offer to help but should you concede that you can’t text, the world is suddenly awash with willing teachers. “It’s soooo easy.”
The non-texter pauses and parries: “Thank you but I’m on my way to the dentist, the airport, a funeral, a heart transplant (mine, I’m a donor).” But the eager instructor has found a cause, another lost soul to save from social oblivion, a person ripe to be hauled into the 21st century.
But the non-texter knows that it won’t stop here. The line of questioning will continue with concerned probing. “Do you Facebook? How about tweeting?”
“Tweeting? I beg your pardon. I gave up trick or treat a long time ago.” To tweet or not to tweet. Do I tweet?
Hey, I don’t even have a microwave, or a hairdryer, a dish washer or a television, or a steam iron. I can send an email and admit that emailing has made working from home possible but have never purchased anything online. I do have electricity and am really interested in engines, cars and aircraft, so I’m not technophobic, I’m just boring, obsolete and, as I have now discovered, an increasing source of embarrassment.
Striding into a mobile-phone store, I inquired in my most assertive “Mom in a hurry please young man serve me” voice, having discovered the gadget in the steering wheel enables a hands-free phone to operate in the car, about a “blue chip”. My daughter cringed and Judas-like edged away from me as the young man smirked, “I think you mean bluetooth.”
I was sure I meant blue chip, not that I knew exactly what a blue chip was and insisted that I needed a blue chip in order to receive phone calls while driving.
By then the sales assistant was openly laughing. People were staring at me. I had become a Martian, no, a social pariah, and my former daughter was standing in the street outside, disengaged, peering into a future that did not include me.
The communications revolution is about communicating at a distance, if in a communal, rather public and admittedly professional context. I tweet so therefore I am, or in my case, I don’t tweet, so therefore I am not.
I send traditional cards to my friends and they phone me to thank me, and then ask what I wrote as no one can read my handwriting. I’m not saying I’m complacent and do accept that Facebooking and tweeting and texting are communication tools, but so too is old-style human speech, a very useful thing as my handwriting is dramatic if illegible.
Um, what exactly is a smartphone? Is it very stylish or merely intelligent? Does it have a blue chip?
Ronan Guilfoyle
RONAN GUILFOYLE IS a jazz musician and head of the jazz department in Dublin’s Newpark Music Centre.
He doesn’t have a mobile phone. “I have never had one, and I wouldn’t know how to send a text, would you believe.”
Instead, he uses email constantly. “Not having a mobile is a completely conscious decision, but my reasons for not having a phone have changed,” he says.
“I’m active in many areas – as a performer, musician and teacher. I’m in demand a lot in that a lot of people want to talk to me. I didn’t want a phone because I just didn’t want to have another way for people to reach me, to be quite honest.
“When I leave the house, I can go somewhere and not have someone instantly contact me. I would find that quite stressful.”
Guilfoyle also chooses not to have a mobile because he considers it too distracting.
“I was sitting in a cafe in Cairo in 2005, in a beautiful place, just drinking in the atmosphere, and all seven people with me were on their mobiles, having seven different conversations.
“To me, I was taking in the atmosphere, and they were all somewhere else.”
After that experience, he became more determined than ever not to have a mobile.
He thinks that “the mobile phone creates its own needs once you have it. I’m just living in a world everyone lived in before mobile phones. I find that people’s attitudes to me not having a phone went from vaguely acceptable to eccentric and barking mad back to vaguely admirable again.
“I do realise it’s a pain for people when they’re trying to contact me, but I’m quite conscientious about email. With email, you can control when you contact someone. But a phone just rings.”
Guilfoyle says that people have “grumblingly” adapted to his “eccentricity”. He makes additional efforts not to be late to meet people, usually checking out in advance how long it is going to take him to get to the meeting.
“People might think it’s strange not to have a mobile, but I’ve just kept on doing what I’ve always done so it doesn’t seem strange to me.”
Norma Smurfit
CHARITY FUNDRAISER Norma Smurfit has recently been working on the Spring Clean for Charity Sale, which took place in the RDS last weekend in aid of St Vincent de Paul and Focus Ireland. Last year, the event – where people set up stalls to sell items they no longer want – raised €200,000. It’s a big project to oversee, which makes it all the more surprising that Smurfit has never sent an email in her life.
“I do have a mobile phone, which I use for texting. But I’ve never sent an email,” Smurfit admits. “I don’t have a computer at home, much to my grandchildren’s disgust.”
Smurfit likes to make personal contact with people, and considers email to be impersonal. Hence she either phones people, or writes cards and letters. “I wrote about 30 letters this morning asking people to support the fundraiser, and there are at least 20 more to write. For me, it’s the personal way to do it. I have nothing against technology, but at the moment I don’t need it. I don’t find it an inconvenience not to have a computer.
“People think I’m quite quaint, but since I don’t use email or computers, I don’t miss it. It’s not a technophobe thing: I can work most other electrical things – I can work Sky and Sky Plus, for example. I’m afraid I’m just a bit lazy. Every Christmas and New Year, I say I’ll get a computer and I never do.”
Smurfit books cinema tickets and makes restaurant reservations via the phone. When it comes to buying airline tickets, a procedure now done almost exclusively online, she explains that she has “people to do things for me in the Smurfit office”.
The time that others spend online, Smurfit spends reading and watching “interesting programmes on television”. She admits that when she’s organising an event, such as the latest fundraiser, she relies on external help, but reiterates the fact she writes her own fundraising letters, which “have the personal touch”.
