Everything Everywhere All At Once was the name of the relentless 2022 multiverse thriller starring Michelle Yeoh and no film title has summed up the experience of modern life so aptly.
Ironically, it was a film I could never quite finish because I kept getting distracted. I was like one of those Gen Z-ers, browsing on the phone, one eye on the telly, one on Insta, another one on Wordle. You need at least three eyes, it seems. And 30 fingers.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like my attention is under constant assault these days. Settling down to focus on one task seems to get trickier and trickier. Emails pinging, social media zinging, news, podcasts, breakfast television that goes on for decades, a squillion TV channels shouting about the end of the world as we know it .…
It shouldn’t be this way. The reason I know this is that I had the privilege of growing up in a world without this never-ending multisensory kaleidoscope of, well, stuff… Young people these days are digital natives and they know very little about the old analogue world we inhabited – the world of cassette tapes, occasional boredom, Bovril and having to wait for stuff, sometimes for months. Albums, concerts, phone calls, an mp3 to download over dial-up ….
The problem with people like me, though, is that I’m over 40, and ever since humans walked the Earth (or got to live ‘til they were 40) you’ve had old codgers blabbing on about the good old days before electric light, and the printed word, or heavy metal, or whatever the moral panic of the day was.
There has been a lot of conflicting research into how the introduction of the smartphone has coincided with a mental health epidemic amongst young people.
For every person who tells you that the phone is nothing but a tool for distraction and cyberbullying in school settings and that they should be banned outright, there are people who will point to the amazing benefits these devices confer on their users. Never in history has so much information and creativity been in the hands of young people in the form of mobile technology.
Unfortunately, this also means that never in history have kids been so exposed to all the negatives and dangers inherent in the internet and the wild experiment that is social media.
So when Norma Foley announced that there would be a phone ban on the way for second level schools, she was following an international trend in the general direction of prohibition.
For good reason, we don’t allow kids to smoke cigarettes in the schoolyard or bring naggins of vodka in their school bags.
But comparing these vices with the use of smartphones is simplistic and we all know what teenagers do when you tell them they can’t have something, right? I mean, is there any other cohort of the population more aware of their human rights?
It’s not possible to put a genie back in a bottle – it’s up to schools and parents to get up to speed with what is happening with their kids online and educate themselves first before opening a mature discussion with young people about what technology is doing for and to them.
Of course we need to protect them with strong policies and foster a culture of non-acceptance of certain behaviours.
We need to be aware of the nefarious motivations of multinationals who use attention as currency and who take little responsibility for the aftermath.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Outstanding in a D3 field
IRISH fans of Oasis were themselves victims of this new technological world this week and everyone in Ireland must surely be aware of the concept of dynamic pricing at this stage.
For those of you who aren’t, this is the system whereby customers are essentially pitched against each other in a model closer to an auction, but with software selecting the highest bids.
And so last Saturday, all over Ireland, people who are supposedly put to the pin of their collar due to the cost-of-living crisis, were willing to fork out over four hundred quid to stand in a wet field watching two brothers fighting.
John B Keane would make a fortune in this economy.
Apparently, it’s something we will see a lot more of (dynamic pricing, not brothers pucking the heads off each other).
In the US, Wendy’s has dynamic pricing for burgers. Yep, you read that right. Bad news for people who are hungry at dinner time when demand is highest but good news if you are willing to get up and eat your fast food at 6am.
There is already an element of dynamic pricing in our energy supply market, of course, with the opportunity to save money by using electricity at off peak times.
Soon, capitalism will have its way, and everything will be like a never-ending auction all the time and we’ll all be so absolutely exhausted that we’ll just cave in and hand over our wallets at the start of the day.
I don’t really understand how this pricing system works with a band like Oasis, though, supposedly the epitome of English working class values, now putting on concerts out of reach of the people they grew up with.
Where are the off-peak tickets to balance out the in-demand ones in this case?
Or will the people behind the system not just admit it for what it is – a supersonic champagne supernova rip-off you’d have to live forever to pay for?
On yer bike to the Dáil!
BAD value and soaring costs aren’t just the preserve of the private sector, of course.
This week it was revealed that the Office for Public Works (OPW) spent €335,000 on building a bike shelter to store 18 bikes outside Dáil Éireann.
It’s hard enough to get people to renounce their cynicism about politics, not to mention climate action, when stats like this are released.
It seems €322,282 was spent on the main construction and installation, apparently, with €2,952 more on archaeological services and another €10,816 quantity surveying service.
The only way to claw back some value for money, it seems, would be to have Taylor Swift do a concert in it next summer.
