This nice piece by my friend Craig Grannell on experiencing life through a smartphone screen reminded me of this, a column I did for .net in 2009.

I was visiting the BBC recently, and I arrived just after a large delegation of Japanese visitors. As I waited to be ushered inside, I watched the group unwittingly living up to the stereotype of gadget-wielding photography obsessives. They filmed and photographed the receptionists at work. They filmed and photographed the security guards. They filmed and photographed people coming in and out. Most of all, they filmed and photographed each other filming and photographing.

The first thing I thought was: I’m glad I don’t have to edit all that footage into something interesting. But my second thought was more serious. Photos and videos are hyperlinks to memories, icons that your brain double-clicks to bring back the full experience – the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of a happy day or a crappy one. Increasingly, though, we’re using gadgets to record the whole experience. That makes us passive observers, not active participants.

As soon as you start fiddling with a piece of technology, your attention is on the technology – so if you’re filming the bit of a gig where the singer hits those emotional highs, you’re removing yourself from the very thing you paid all that money to experience. When you tweet about the cute thing your kid just did, your attention’s on Twitter, on making your point in 140 characters, not on what your kid’s doing.  When you check email during a conversation, you’re temporarily tuning out the person or people you’re with. And when you film every waking moment you’re giving your attention to the framing, to the focus, to the F-stop, to the battery warning light that’s flickering in the corner of the viewfinder.

What you’re not doing is experiencing the thing you’re photographing, or twittering about, or filming. You’re not paying attention to the sounds, the smells, all the little details that make the moment special and burn it into your brain. For all our fancy trousers and our clever gadgets we’re a fairly simple species, and our caveman minds weren’t designed for multitasking.

That means that your gadget – your iPhone, your HD camcorder, your Blackberry – is the digital watch in the Biblical epic, the Ford Mondeo in the costume drama. It’s the bit of the novel where the author suddenly addresses you directly. It’s the drunk who bumps into you at the rock gig. It’s the noisy crisp eater behind you in the cinema. It’s the faraway music that stops you sleeping. It’s the thief that steals your attention, ends the immersion, takes you out of the moment and leaves you outside, looking in.

Of course gadgets have their place, and the world would be a lot poorer without smartphones, camcorders and other devices. But we need to be careful, because if we give them too much of our attention, if we experience our entire lives through a lens or lit by a screen, we’re no longer creating hyperlinks. Instead, our photos, our Facebook updates and our tweets are dead links, shortcuts that can only ever lead to a mental Page Not Found.

I thought about this at last week’s Eels gig, when the woman next to me filmed the whole gig on her phone. As she watched the screen throughout, that means her video isn’t a reminder of what the gig was like; it’s a reminder of what filming the gig was like. It’s an important difference.

Me, on Techradar, writing about wearables.

It’s often said that smartphones are driven by fashion, but that isn’t really true. There are trends, of course, such as the current vogue for gold. But ultimately if a phone’s good enough and doesn’t actually frighten small children you won’t care too much what it looks like, because you’re either using it or it’s in your pocket or bag.

Wearables are different, and watches especially so.

Walt Mossberg, one of the world’s best known tech writers, has written about platforms and their defenders. While comparing tech firms’ fans to religious devotees is one of the oldest cliches in the book, he’s right about the behaviour of people who believe their choice of computer, smartphone or games console is superior to others’ choice of computer, smartphone or games console:

It’s really not okay to pour down personal hate and derision on people who happen to use and like a tech product that competes with the one you prefer. I’m pretty sure that kind of behavior violates the tenets of, you know, all the real religions. And it’s really over the top to become so devoted to a tech company that you can’t see the point of view of others who don’t buy, or even like, that company’s products.

Every tech writer is all too familiar with the oft-expressed idea that “the only explanation for a positive review of an Apple product is a payoff”, although I wish it were only limited to Apple things: in my experience, the payoff thing is levelled when you’re positive or critical about pretty much anything.

Pointing it out won’t make any difference, of course. As Douglas Adams famously wrote, when people suggest we try being nicer to one another they tend to end up nailed to trees.

I was very pleased with this column I wrote for .net about boredom.

I spent most of last night glued to a screen watching a Twitter stream, refreshing my RSS feeds, clicking on various interesting links and using recommendation engines to find writing worth reading. After a while, I’d read the entire internet, so I kept on refreshing Twitter and the RSS feeds, and the interesting-link websites, and the recommendation engines. I was bored. Unfortunately, I wasn’t bored enough to go and do something more worthwhile.

This week’s news that a Twitter abuser suddenly saw the light when it was suggested that his tweets be sent to his mum reminded me of this, a column I wrote for .net back in 2008.

Britain may not have an empire any more, but we still rule the world of bad driving. Sure, the Italians are maniacs, the Americans are too busy eating to watch the road and the Germans seem determined to drive faster than the speed of light, but when it comes to sheer arrogant, ignorant, arsey and downright dangerous driving nobody can touch us.

I’m guilty of it too. Give me five minutes in a city centre and I’m shouting the c-word at cyclists, the b-word at bus drivers, the p-word at pedestrians and every expletive ever invented at Audi drivers. Only the last one is really justified.

What these various offenders have in common is that they can’t hear me or see me – and that gives me a licence to be utterly unpleasant, just like everyone else on the roads. It’s why people block box junctions, or cut you up, or drive at 200mph through primary school playgrounds. They’re not bad people; they’re just not sharing the world with the rest of us. Brits are particularly bad for it, because we’re so buttoned-up the rest of the time.

There’s a proper scientific term for this: disinhibition. In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt explains that while we’re forced to interact with others on the roads we don’t – can’t – communicate with them, so we become overgrown toddlers, interested only in ourselves and reduced to eye-popping, throat-shredding, nappy-filling fury at the slightest frustration. Interestingly, Vanderbilt reports that people in open-topped cars tend to be nicer and more patient, not because they’re happier, or because they’re getting lots of Vitamin D but because they’re less insulated than other drivers, less able to pretend that the world isn’t there.

And of course, disinhibition is a key part of being online. Our computers are our cars, ensuring that people don’t know us, can’t see us, can’t make us immediately answerable for our actions. They remove the respect for authority that prevents us shouting “Oi! Specky!” at Stephen Hawking and they erase the empathy that stops us going mental in Morrison’s when the person in front attempts to pay with string. That can be a good thing, because it encourages people to open up and express themselves in ways they might not in the real world, but of course when someone is in a negative frame of mind (or young – the bits of our brains that handle inhibitions aren’t mature until after adolescence, which is why we do so much dumb stuff as teenagers) then it turns them into online Audi drivers.

So is there anything we can do to make the internet, well, nicer? According to Vanderbilt, rules and safety systems just make drivers worse; it turns out that the best way to make car owners more responsible would be to mount a dagger in the steering wheel, its blade pointing directly at the driver. Perhaps we need an IT equivalent, like a remotely operated boxing glove mounted on a giant spring – or better still, a system where every abusive email, blog comment or forum post is copied to your mum.

A fun wee thing I did for Techradar: ten digital-age dodos.