And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Or so sang John Lennon, the 30th anniversary of whose death was commemorated this month. Can it really be that long ago?. Curiously, the music and image of the former Beatle doesn’t seem dated, even though he is a figure from digital prehistory. Lennon died before there were mobile phones, personal computers or the internet. He was a product of the mass media, but that media has changed in ways he could never have comprehended.
If you compare the world as it is now, in 2010, even with how we lived only a decade ago, at the Millennium, the differences are striking enough. Flat screen TVs, mobile computers, sat nav broadband and WiFi have transformed our work and leisure. Social networking - Facebook, Twitter and the rest - has changed the way we relate to each other to such an extent that we don’t really know what the word “friend” means any more. We had email ten years ago, but it didn’t dominate our lives . And while blogging was on the horizon, no one thought that the newspaper industry would face a crisis because of it. Digital technology has accelerated the pace of modern life. We live in a real time world, where information is no longer something you have to spend time finding, but is ever present in one electronic form or another.
