The latest outbreak of hysteria about the web is another example of old-fogey nostalgia
DOES ANYONE remember clackers? One of the most basic – not to say genitally suggestive – toys of the 1970s comprised two plastic spheres, each suspended from a string attached to the same plastic tab. The trick was to twitch the tab in such a way that the spheres smashed off one another at both the nadir and the apex of arcs defined by the strings.
Look, I agree it was slightly pathetic. I know it sounds only marginally more sophisticated than the cup-and-ball game that was popular during the Black Death. Trust me. There was nothing else to do.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before – as was the way then – somebody decided the mildly diverting playthings were appallingly dangerous. The sensible, unglamorous aunts and uncles who presented Blue Peter turned up with ashen faces to tell horror stories of youths being carried off to hospital after clackers had exploded in their faces. Don’t delay! Destroy all clackers immediately!
There is, these days, a great deal of bogus chatter about the terrifying advance of health-and- safety fascism. Children aren’t allowed to play conkers without wearing crash helmets. All ladders are to be banned. You know the sort of thing.
Study public information films from the 1970s, however, and you will surely concede such hysteria is nothing new. If the pocket horror movies are to be believed, we were under constant threat from standing water, untended chip pans and kites in pylons.
A few years before we ended up with electronic devices that needed to remain plugged in at all times – answering machines, video recorders and so forth – we were ordered, for fear of mass annihilation, to clear all sockets before retiring to bed. In some part of my brain, I still expect an entire generation to be wiped out by asphyxiation via plastic bag.
Then there was the stealthier, less aggressive threat posed by television itself.
Only properly popularised during the 1960s in this territory, the television set was still regarded as a dangerous novelty by many adults. It wasn’t just the content that endangered impressionable children. The very apparatus harboured, it seemed, the power to seriously damage their health.
If you sat too close to the screen you could “damage your eyes”. If you looked at it from too acute an angle the effects could be even more dramatic. Have you not noticed the epidemic of blindness among citizens now in their late 40s? The Day of the Triffids begins to look like a documentary.
Hang on. What was this column supposed to be about? Having watched so much bad television as a child, I now have absolutely no powers of concentration. What with the impaired eyes and the poisoned brain, I can barely descend a flight of stairs without collapsing into a pathetic bruised heap.
Oh yes. The internet. Earlier this month, Newsweek magazine, unsure about its semi-thesis, asked a question rather than making a statement. “Is the web driving us mad?”
The piece was packed with quotes from “researchers” and information from “studies”. One paragraph sought to prove that kids with a particularly high interest in the internet were disproportionately prone to serious depression.
“They also opened, closed and switched browser windows more frequently, searching, one imagines, and not finding what they hoped to find,” the article noted. Well, “one imagines” all kinds of things.
Might already depressed kids be more likely to turn to the internet in an effort to find a way out of their misery? Fat people tend to diet more often than thin people. That doesn’t mean that dieting makes you fat.
Elsewhere, we meet a researcher who has decided that web users’ “digital selves” – the person they become when online – sometimes take on the quality of the imagined personae resulting from dissociative identity disorder. Apparently, a frequent online poker player, when tested, appeared to exhibit what we used to call a split personality.
Now, having dulled my brain with too much television and damaged my body following repeated childhood encounters with standing water, I am in no position to question the findings of Newsweek’s various boffins.
I am aware that the layman’s casual intuition is near worthless when pitched against the peer- reviewed findings of professional scientists. All that said, I hereby state that this all sounds like prime, grade-A baloney.
There are certainly awful things about the internet.
The way in which stupid Twitter, with its constant availability, portability and accessibility, never allows users to disconnect fills sensible folk with gloom. The intemperate nature of much (arguably most) online debate really does debase contemporary discourse. But this latest outbreak of hysteria comes across like yet another example of old fogeys finding fresh ways of proving that life was better in the olden days.
It really wasn’t. Plastic bags stalked us. Plugs were always on the point of exploding violently. Clackers drove us mad.