2D Goes Live.

Read a weekend newspaper article on our ever-present screens, on compulsion, addiction and a lack of any convincing argument against their growing consumption of our time. TV provides entertainment, iPods music, iPads a myriad of social networks and multi-media information and iPhones pictures, texting and voice communication. We have the technology to enjoy, learn and connect like never before. Where parents have their suspicions the older generation like me appear jabbering luddites incapable of grasping the supposed advantages of this two dimensional technology. I’m not talking about computers here, I’m skilled in their uses in graphics, CAD design and engineering, publishing and music, each one requiring a long learning curve in their own specific and costly software. I’m talking of the generation of screens post computers that require little more than the ability to prod a screen and use a remote. Where learning a CAD program takes a three-week full time course to just get started the functionality of iScreens can be fingered into action almost immediately. Like Sparky’s Magic Piano, if you’re old enough to remember it, no effort is required to bring them into all singing all dancing life. But it’s that seductive easiness that brings its own perils because life is not that easy. The effect seems to be to install the belief, not that life is easy but there is a valid techno alternative, a sort of two-dimensional life that can provide an easy alternative to the more demanding enjoyment, learning and communication experiences of real life. Enjoyment can become the re-living of one’s ‘on screen’ experiences, one’s anecdotes the dialogue from favourite sitcoms rather than the pleasure and perils of actual doings. Learning similarly comes from ‘on screen’ facts. People can become a walking encyclopaedia of TV programs, celebrity lives, sports and sporting careers, which, though impressive as a feat of memory, has no real world application. The same encyclopaedic knowledge applied to horticulture might get you on the panel of Gardeners Question Time but as it’s not derived from years of direct experience it remains a bubble of disassociated facts and opinion that are no use to anyone. And finally if 80% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal a phone conversation is at best 20% and texting and tweeting must barely register. iScreens are not high tech information gateways to a bright new future but the sleek equivalents of a pre-schoolers activity centre. Studies have shown it takes around 4,000 hours to become skilled at an activity and 10,000 to achieve mastery. What does that say about an iScreen if one can master it in thirty minutes? That it’s just incredibly easy to use or that it’s not really a valid activity at all?