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I bet you could never in a million years imagine what I am doing as I write these words, but I will try to paint the picture for you. I am trying to think through a kind of stream of consciousness thing to illustrate the differences between various media and ways of transmitting messages between people.
So here goes, in plain text, what I am doing now. I am sat semi crossed legged on a concrete kerbstone. On my lap is my laptop and my laptop bag. Also the bag I carry them, my waterproof coat and my lunch to work in. Lunch today is sandwiches, four rounds of bread made into two sandwiches, two slices of “chicken roll” (best before today) and one slice of ham. Both cheap nasty stuff from the supermarket. I get my groceries delivered, I order on the net and a van brings it round.
I am not totally comfortable. My shoes are probably getting a little bit scratched. My bum is going numb. Straight out in front of me is quite an interesting site. First an open and empty car park, really an area for vans and articulated lorries to turn around in as they deliver to the back door of the three large stores that are here. Nobody else is around. There are no trains today as they are upgrading the track, there is a replacement bus service instead, I get the choice of being way too early or way too late. I think you can guess which bus I caught. Still nobody here yet. Past the car park is the gasworks. I can see a large “gasometer” which is presumably involved with the regulation of pressure in the mains gas supply in this area. I suppose it would make a reasonable terrorist target.
Beyond the gas works I can see a church. Quite an attractive one, typically English, a tower with clocks in each face, above that the belfry, open tall arched windows to allow out the sound of the bells. Above that four miniature decorative turrets and between them a flagpole. It is flying the English flag, the simple red cross of St George on a white background. Beyond that is the sky, pale to mid blue with a few wispy low pale grey clouds.
So now I am inside again. Forty minutes of waiting and I only managed to translate about forty seconds of thoughts into words. If instead I had used a camera I would have captured far more detail than I was aware of and missed all my thoughts and interpretations. A film or video camera would have exaggerated the same effect even more. We may be visual animals, but not to that degree. Our attention is usually very tightly focused. I have used video cameras that offer enormously powerful “digital zoom” features (in the shop, I could never afford to buy one.). I think that we have those abilities in our brains. Look out of a train window and I can watch a rabbit 400 metres away, and it can fill my attention, if I took a photograph it would be a tiny speck lost in the frame. I cannot literally zoom in and gather more light from that image but I can make it fill up a disproportionately large part of my attention.
Similarly my entire attention can be focused on my mouth, on a taste, or on a tiny part of foot, if I can feel a sharp object in my shoe, or on the memory of a smell that can take me back more than thirty years in an instant.
Strange the way our brains work. Yesterday I tried to commentate on my thoughts and experiences, silently in my head. It was impossible to do. I could just about keep pace with my thoughts with a stream of words but I was missing far more than I was capturing. I look up I see a woman in a second I have made an enormous series of observations and comparisons and assessments. She is black, casually dressed, leaning forward, walking quickly, unaccompanied, chewing, attractive, medium build, late twenties, dressed in trousers with a decorative fringe, a darker material, velvet? Slightly hippy look. Her hair is long, it seems she has both relaxed the curl and introduced rich red brown highlights. All that and much more went through my brain in a second, in a time too short for her to notice that I had noticed her. In a minute I could gather enough thought to fill a book. Not that it would be worth reading.
I make a very strange sight now. Sat astride a wall, as if on a horse, with my laptop on a higher level, just under my chin. People pass by and have no idea what to make of me. I look too fat to be rich, too badly dressed to be using a laptop. They do not know what to make of me. What am I doing? What am I writing. They will never know.
I wish I could capture pure experience, pure thought and transmit it. But how can I? Poetry is a terrible way to communicate, the camera never captures the whole scene and certainly never captures the mood. Video takes up too much bandwidth and still fails to capture reality. Pointing a camera changes the world. The screen shows both more and less than the viewfinder.
My attention is drawn away. A pigeon pecks around my feet. Why does only one peck in five seem to aimed at anything? Most pecks collect nothing and seem to be aimed at nothing. Why would a bird do that? Do these pecks have another function?
Oh cool a laptop!
Yes, can I help you?
Oh well the bus is due soon. I better pack it away before I run out of time to shut down properly.
Five years later I find this file on my laptop. The laptop is now very much on its last legs. The drives don’t work, neither the floppy nor the CD. The battery won’t hold its charge. The whole device is now eleven years old and surely never designed to be used for this long. There is now only one way to get files in and out of this laptop, via the infrared port, fortunately I also possess an elderly mobile phone which has got a functional infrared port. The infrared link is keeping this old laptop alive and giving me the ability to write new material for the site. The phone is now also very old by phone standards, three or four years old and still operating using the original battery, still keeping a reasonably good charge. The combination of these two geriatric pieces of once glittering hardware epitomize my State of the Ark strategy: using whatever works as long as it works.
Another day later. Yes the files are transferred into the phone but there they sit, invisible to the Nokia Browser. I can’t pull them out of the phone and onto my desktop. But there is another way. I can get a USB infrared dongle for my desktop machine which should allow me to push files of any description between the laptop and desktop in either direction, which must surely open up some other possibilities and makes the phone less vital to the set-up. With the phone taken out of the loop and both machines working off mains power there should be no limit to the size of files that can be transferred across, which might allow me to install new software on the laptop. USB will be in use for at least another decade because it is so versatile so even if my desktop machine is replaced in the future I will keep the seven port USB 2 hub and the soon to be purchased infrared dongle which will enable me to run the antique (Pentium 100 MHz, 16 MB RAM, manufactured 14 February 1997) laptop for as long as it continues to work.
The laptop is now of course no longer really a laptop, but a lightweight transportable desktop machine of feeble capacity. My SatNav has a faster processor, my camera has nearly twice as much data storage capacity and my second hand phone displays more colours. But none of that matters. This laptop enables me to write and that makes all the difference in the world. My productivity will be restored. Some of the best articles I have ever written have been written on this laptop in my lunch breaks and other quiet moments. This machine is no harder to put away than a newspaper, a wordsearch or sudoku book, a games console or a make-up bag, and significantly easier to put away when a customer comes than a vacuum cleaner and extension lead trailed across the shop.
While I can write on my days off the reality is that I usually don’t. But now all this can change. If I can get the bulk of the creative writing done on the laptop I can then spend my days off and evenings turning blocks of text into pages and making videos.
Videos really need an empty house and a long time to make them. So far I have made all my YouTube videos using my digital camera. The advantages of this are excellent picture quality and reasonable sound quality. The camera has pin-sharp focus and natural colour reproduction. In contrast the webcam is very much second best in image quality, it can’t handle the “studio style” lighting I use to get the best possible image (it looks over-bright and glaring on the webcam but professional on the digital camera) and the frame rate is noticeably poorer. On the other hand the webcam records direct to the hard disk in .avi format whereas the digital camera panders to the oppressive minority who use Mac’s and records in .mov format onto the SDHC card which has to be downloaded at what feels a ridiculously slow rate and then converted before it can be imported into Windows Movie Maker. Yes there are ways to play with .mov and edit it on a PC without converting it but they don’t work very well (loss of sound synchronization), cost real money, lack the power of Movie Maker or are as user friendly, intuitive and easy to operate as a 1920s Soviet steam locomotive.
My son uses Pinnacle Studio for his video editing and it is apparently very good, but his laptop is a beast and he is always busy with his own creations. His camcorder is also pretty hot, a Sony HDD model with terrific lens and superior sound quality. If you ever come across a video of mine in which the sound seems significantly richer and clearer you will know the reason. Also the camcorder can zoom while the digital camera cannot change the zoom setting during a shot, so that is another clue to watch out for. The really impressive thing about the Panasonic Lumix camera as a tool is its size. It is truly pocket-sized. It is significantly smaller than my previous camera and better in every respect. The previous camera could take movie clips without sound, for short periods and in a small size the Lumix takes “fullsize” 640 x 480 movies (slightly higher resolution than regular television) with sound and the only limit in duration is set by the capacity of your memory card. While this might be a limitation for use on a family holiday I have found that I can do long and multiple takes for YouTube videos with no problems.
I have found that with a good camera it is difficult to use too much light. Whilst most YouTube videos are dark and gloomy I use television studio levels of light to ensure a crisp image and excellent depth of field all in sharp focus. For normal use my little office is illuminated by a 34 watt fluorescent striplight, when it is time to hit the lights for a take I boost that up with a 100 watt halogen bulb in a large white ball shade off to my right plus a 60 watt spotlight shining directly down on the top of my head and an array off to the top left consisting of two 150 watt incandescent lamps and one at 100 watt. Nothing was bought specially for the purpose, it was all lying around the house. Of course the rest of the house is lit with efficient lighting and low energy bulbs predominate but economy is hardly an issue when they are burning for less than an hour per week. I also have a 500 watt halogen floodlight which I can use for special lighting tasks and effects.
Another day on. I have ordered an infrared dongle, it might arrive tomorrow. Of all the hardware that I own it is the oldest working PC which is actually going to be responsible for the most work output. The computer is a misnomer, when it is connected to the internet a computer becomes a digital procrastinator, a machine cunningly designed to optimize the absorption of human interest and speed up the passage of time. The reason the laptop will be a genuine productivity tool for me is because it lacks the capacity to absorb my time in other ways. At home in front of the desktop I can connect to the world. I can send emails, I can browse the net, I can watch videos (or listen to the soundtrack while I look at something else) I can have several tabs open in my browser and several applications. In other words I can find an endless number of reasons not to write something profound. But now I am sat alone with a computer which is set up to process words and save them in a file. It does that very effectively with spell checking on the fly, a keyboard which is big enough to type quickly and accurately without any ambiguity as to whether or not a key has been struck and a hard drive which is more than adequate for my modest requirements. I also have at my finger the Concise Oxford English dictionary, thesaurus and dictionary of quotations. Despite being a puny 16 MB of RAM and 100 MHz processor the machine is fast, it boots as fast as any computer I have ever owned because I am not asking it to load up with anything that isn’t required. It is an optimum solution to my needs. It does what I need it to do and no more, and it looks and is too old to be worth stealing. In that respect it matches the till computer, which apart from the LCD screen looks every inch the late nineties beige box it is.
My son’s laptop has got 2GB of RAM, a much bigger screen, a DVD rewriter, modem, wired and wireless network connections, Bluetooth and several USB sockets. But if I had that machine or something like it I would be watching DVDs, playing games or worse. The greatest asset this laptop has is that it has no way to connect with any of the shop’s hardware, with the possible exception of connecting the dot matrix printer, something that would be utterly futile as well as monumentally stupid. There’s no modem, no USB sockets, no floppy disc drive. There’s nothing there to tempt me into doing anything stupid. There’s just a blank page and a prompt asking for me to write. This is exactly what I want.
One more day. Saturday, 24 May 2008. Yes the dongle did arrive the very next day, I'm glad I didn't pay for express delivery, and yes, it looks like it's worked, doesn't it? The 115.2 kbps transfer worked fine, at least out of the laptop. Whether I will be able to get any files transferred into the laptop remains to be seen, but that isn't so important. The important thing is the material locked away on that old laptop is now accessible and I can continue to use it to write more stuff.
A few months later. I have never managed to get the laptop to accept anything, it is a one way channel, but that's OK, I only want the laptop for writing, nothing else is required. I have subsequently found a way to get the files out of the phone, but it doesn't matter. I will probably be getting a new phone soon, another cast-off, it doesn't have an infrared capability so the dongle was worth getting.