I've not been able to blog for a while due to a variety of reasons, well two actually; 1) I've had a ridiculous amount of uni work to get through and 2) I was without internet access for a while. And this made me realise just how much we rely on Technology.
These past few weeks I have had stress after stress, over deadlines, over pressure and over my fucking laptop. I have a very strong and heated love/hate relationship with my laptop. It was nearly 4 years ago when I saw a picture of it in a catalogue and it was love at first sight....bright pink, widescreen, white keys. So when I received it as a present after passing my GCSEs I was really happy.
And it worked fine for many years, and then last year the problems seemed to start. I moved to halls of residence in London and for the first time ever, had my own internet access. I was never lucky enough to grow up with it at home so I was pretty happy about it. Although my bank balance didn't appreciate my new found love for internet shopping (I'm such a sucker for eBay) and my laptop didn't appreciate my new susceptibility to viruses. I spent a night pulling my hair out in frustration and contemplating throwing it out of my 11th floor window.
My laptop being a dickhead doesn't seem that much of a problem considering I have a blackberry. But it is a blackberry which insists on freezing 3 times a day requiring a reboot each time. And rebooting a blackberry takes about as long as it would to carve yourself a new phone out of wood using nothing but a spoon.
Mobile phones rule our lives enormously. I remember when I got my first ever mobile when I was in year 7 and it was the size of an average house brick with an aerial reaching as high as Jupiter. But then I got my Nokia 3310, oh yes, THE phone of the time. If you weren't playing Snake then you were nobody.
I'm also shamelessly addicted to facebook. Even when I'm on holiday I'm feeding euros into the computers in shabby internet cafes just because I feel like I'm out of sync with the entire world if I can't check my news feed or inform all of my 'friends' that something is pissing me off. Being away from facebook is like being in Siberia - cold, lonely and boring.
Mark Zuckerberg was mentioned in one of my lecture's recently, in a sun-shines-out-of-his-arse kind of way and I guess facebook is a good thing. You can use it to find people who were nasty to you at school and seek pleasure from the fact that they've gotten really fat, you can upload albums after albums of drunken pictures so it becomes a flick book for perverts, and let's be honest, most of us use it just because we're nosey.
There are things about it which I dislike though.
Like, firstly, soppy pathetic loved-up couples. If you are truly in love you don't need to write it on every status to show it, if you loved each other that much then you'd be spending more time having fun together than you would be telling facebook how much you love 'snuggless mwah mwah' with your 'baby'. Real love should be louder than words. And I'm not just being cynical because I'm single and miserable, I am actually single for a reason.
Growing up amongst Disney films and music written by sad men with guitars has made me a bit of a romantic. But I won't settle for less than perfect. Some people just cannot be alone so they'll go out with pretty much anyone just to fill some gap in their life because they can't bear to be alone. Now, I'm not like that. I do prefer to be in a relationship rather than be single but I'm very selective about who I'm in them with, which is why I've been single for so long and all of my 'relationships' have been quite short-lived, because I'm stupidly picky.
I can be seeing a perfectly 'nice' guy and be content with it, but if there's no passion then I may as well be going out with a hot water bottle. You can cuddle it, it keeps you warm but you don't really need it and wouldn't really miss it if wasn't around. I go for 'that feeling' over everything else every single time. And I wouldn't want to miss out on the perfect guy for me, Mr Right, who could crash into my life at any time because I'm too busy watching Eastenders with Mr Right Now.
Another thing I hate about facebook is people with ridiculous display names. Your name on facebook should be your real name, not some stupid persona you've decided to come up with. Like those people who put something that they like as their middle name. For example, Laura 'luvsdavodka' Smith or Tim 'LUFC' Jones. As me and my friends have pointed out before my facebook display name isn't Rachael 'lovescock&moaning' Taberner is it? And the worst culprits are those who graduate from uni and add the BSc or the BA to the end of their name. Fair enough if you're signing your name on a business document but on facebook? It doesn't make you appear any more intelligent as people can still see your gramatically incorrect statuses and your ability to fall for scams such as 'Blah blah has viewed my profile 300 times this week, omg, find out who is stalking your profile before it's too late'. I shall congratulate you in advance on winning the Nigerian lottery and receiving a huge inheritance from your long-lost Uncle Egowba. Morons.
Of course the internet is a wonderful thing in the majority of cases, but there is just so much hate escalated around it. What did people do before the internet? Attach a message to a pigeon telling their ex-boyfriend to fuck off? Or put a message in a bottle to point out that someone looks fat in that dress?
The internet can also be dangerous. Every single time I'm ill, I google my symptoms and become convinced that I'm dying. I once accidentally wore a ripped contact lens, had a huge swollen red eye after an hour and obviously had to take it out. And I decided to google how long it would be before I could wear my lenses again rather than bothering my optician with a question like that. But google told me that I now definitely had a corneal ulcer and would be blind in 24 hours and dead in 48. Gulp.
A lot of modern technology is revolutionary, but some are just pretty pointless. Take Kindles for example. One of my favourite things about reading a book is the book smell. The smell of new paper, or if it's a library book, then the smell of fusty old paper. But either way I love the book smell. If I get a Kindle how am I supposed to smell my books? The only thing that will happen is that my eyes will bleed and explode from reading off a blindingly bright light so much. And the iPad is pretty shit too, it is just an iPod touch for fat people (or cats).
Sometimes technology can take important sentimental things away from us, and transform them into some electrical abstract format that can be seen or heard but can't be touched or appreciated as much as it should be. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I like to have a photograph that you can hold in your hand, and music that comes in a case with booklets and artwork, not just an artist and title on my itunes playlist.
