MY FATHER never drove a car. He never sent an email. He never sent a text message. He certainly never spoke to anyone via Zoom or attended a Teams meeting. That is not to say he was some desperately old fashioned man or someone bewildered by anything technological. He could put down his paper and, amongst the hundreds of TV channels, find that sports channel in double-quick time if the pressure was on. This is more to realise just how much all our lives have changed so much in such a short space of time.
When I was a child, for instance, we luxuriated in England in having around four tv channels whereas when we came to Ireland they only had two and one of them didn’t seem to come on until the evening. We also had a phone box right at the end of our street whereas my Granny Murphy had to use one in the snug of Flannery’s.
I’m not just engaging in nostalgia here. The point is the days of technology gradually arriving in Dingle or Castlebar many years after it had been in London or Birmingham are long gone. The same technology is now everywhere in the world. We all now have the same shared technological life. Everyone is online whether in Canada or Longford. The same technology blankets all our lives. So much so, in fact, that it affects all our lives and the way we all think.
Something happens somewhere far, far away and someone in Offaly instantly knows all about it and instantly has an opinion. Something terrible happens in Dublin and within minutes information about it has spread and people from the other side of the city are descending on the scene based not upon what actually happened but upon something someone somewhere online said about it. Where that someone online actually is we don’t know. Mayo? Moscow? Beijing? Northside of Dublin? North Korea?
So it now seems that, no matter where you are, the collapse in reliable information has coincided with the rise of opinion. Everyone everywhere has an opinion on everything. Whether you actually know where Dublin is, or Cavan or Galway, please let us know your opinion on what is happening there and rest assured your opinion is as valid as anyone else’s.
Set fire to a disused paint factory in Coolock because someone said something and that is now such a definite fact to you that you are committing arson. This blanket technology, then, is bleeding into real life and we are all caught up in it. So the technology we all now live with is not just a background on which the kids watch TikTok or endlessly scroll it is affecting physical life whether you are in New York or Dublin.
My father used to tell a story about one of the jobs he had before emigrating. It was delivering poles across fields to install rural electrification across the Cork countryside. The poles were dragged across the field by a horse. He only died in 2019 so I’m not talking about some long vanished figure from some long vanished life. But it sounds just like that, doesn’t it? It seems, at times, as if we have failed to acknowledge the fundamental social changes we’ve all lived through. The Ireland I came to in 1999 is a far different country from the one we now live in. Not just because of the mobile phones and the broadband and the social media.
Different because those things have changed the way we think, the way we talk to each other, the opinions we have, and the actions we take. And that is the case, it is important to reiterate, whether we are in Carlow or Cairo.
Of course the bigger question is whether that fundamental change is for the better? Has it made us here in Ireland kinder, for instance? Has it made us more generous? Has it made us more understanding? Has it made us more welcoming, more accommodating? Or has it made us meaner, more ignorant, quicker to judge? Has it made us, for all the channels and all the instant news, better informed or less well informed?
My father was one of those Irishmen who was often silent. Not in any way sullen or morose or withdrawn. Just happy to not speak if nothing needed to be said. And sometimes, when others were at their loudest and their most opinionated, to be honest their most ill informed, he wouldn’t berate or rage, he’d just lift an eyebrow and pick up the paper. I’m not sure you can do that online.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Digitalisation, Modern Ireland, Technology
