PresentTense: In my local cafe during the week, the manager was cursing the CD player. No point in replacing it, I told her, the compact disc is almost obsolete technology.
At which moment she reached for something under the counter. I flinched, presuming that she was about to respond to my self-assured insight with the swing of a baseball bat. Instead, she produced the tape-playing walkman she still uses every day.
It was an odd thing to see: a Japanese soldier of personal stereos emerging into the open years after the world had moved on. Chunky and fragile, it contained a C-90 tape. I wondered if the recording runs out halfway through a song as it hits the end of side one; if you can hear the faint, backward echoes of the tracks on the other side; or if delicate surgery is occasionally required to free an unspooled tape.
As we stood there, admiring this ancient object as if the last dodo had just waddled in and asked for a smoothie, it occurred to me that a lot of younger folk wouldn't recognise such a device. Show them an old walkman and they might guess that it's some kind of fancy Blackberry holder.
"They laugh at me on the bus," its owner admitted. OK, so it hardly makes her Rosa Parks, but you've got to admire her nerve. I bought an MP3 player only last year. It can store about 5,000 songs and holds a fair chunk of my record collection as well as downloaded live sets and podcasts. It is a wonderful bit of machinery. Yet, when friends or colleagues have a look at it, the first thing they usually do is weigh it in their hands like it's a prize vegetable before commenting, "it's a bit chunky, isn't it?" I wouldn't equate it with someone gazing at my child and remarking, "he's got a bit of a squint", but it hurts in its own way.
Perhaps it's as well to have something that's 20 years out of date as 20 months. The pace of technological change is accelerating so rapidly it has bred a peculiar consumer angst about when exactly a person should jump in on a new technology. When can you know a gadget is obsolete? I tend to follow this rough rule of thumb: when I buy it. You can pretty much guarantee that as you bring your new, expensive plasma TV out the shop's front door, a delivery van is out the back unloading a version that is thinner, clearer, records programmes you didn't even know you wanted to see and will watch the goldfish while you're away.
Everything, it seems, is either obsolete, or on the way out. In music, cassette players gave way to minidiscs and CD players, which have lost out to MP3 players, which will be overtaken by multi-tasking phones. Television is being strangled by computers that are out of date before they leave the factory. Radio is losing out to podcasting. Newspapers are antiquated and losing out to the web (with one glorious exception!). Video is gone, DVD will soon follow. For years, Sony and Toshiba have been battling over new DVD formats Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I could explain each of these, but they'd be obsolete by the time I did.
On a more personal level, because we keep so much information in digital form, as software and hardware changes so rapidly it means that we're in danger of losing stored notes, e-mails, music and the photographs of everything from your wedding to your kids' first steps. As a side issue, how will the auction houses of the future fill their catalogues? There will be few crafted letters or insightful manuscripts. It will be somehow less thrilling to hear of someone turning up a long-lost text message by John Updike.
Of more consequence to posterity is the challenge to archivists faced with saving enormous amounts of digitised technology in a format that is accessible to future generations. Going back over the past couple of decades, PC users first stored information on tapes, then large floppy discs, then onto smaller ones, then on to Zip drives and CDs, and much of it in software incompatible with the latest computers. Huge amounts of information are being lost. If a great disaster was to befall mankind the great wisdom of the 21st century could be wiped away. On the plus side, it might take with it entire series of Love Island and Celebrity You're A Star, these being civilisation's equivalent of having a couple of Phil Collins albums in the record collection.
About the only bit of technology not yet declared dead is the internet itself. So here goes. The internet is dead. Pointless. Obsolete. Someday soon, we'll see the re-emergence of technology that is sturdy, long-lasting and easy to read. And then you'll be glad you held on to those stone tablets.
