Same Old Thing

The internet (or should that be Internet!), has inevitably produced vast quantities of Social Media nonsense. If you don’t ‘tweet’, then you don’t amount to nuthin! If Donald Trump – arch-tweeter and temporary commander-in-chief (No capitals. Intentional) of the great USA, is anything to go by, then the bar is set exceeding low.
All this new technology, all these great new ideas …

Let me take you back a few years. 1982. The latest and greatest fad was CB Radio. By Christmas, every idiot in the land had a CB, and, though it was not called Social Media, everyone had an opinion. A million voices on only 40 channels. Thank heavens that the normal range was less than 20 miles. Admittedly, there were a few Italians with 1000 Watt amplifiers fitted to their council flats, but spreading their mind across half of Europe, meant that the message intelligence was woefully thin.

Now, anyone can reach almost anywhere in the world (excluding those countries that feature ‘people’ or ‘democratic’ in the name!). All the scams (the ‘little buddy dying child’, the ‘we know when you’re out so we can burgle your home’, the ‘glamorous beauty queen meet-up) were there, all those years ago on the CB. And, despite its popularity with immature youth, many of advanced years used CB to communicate with friends when travel became increasingly difficult. It wasn’t all bad. It did have a sense of fun.
Every night, somewhere across the 40 channels, you could find a rich assortment of characters. Nobody used their real names – they all used ‘handles’. Solo, Little Sir Echo, Highlander, Ebony Eyes, and White Bruce and a host of others, could be heard, most nights in my locality. Real people. Then there were the jokers: Virginia Ham ( 2 sisters who passed the microphone back and forward, and defied anyone to guess who was actually talking), Harold and Mildred ( a pair of geriatric lovebirds, who pursued a long-distance romance across the airways, oblivious to everyone else. They ultimately had a large audience, who faithfully followed the ins and outs of vintage romance and faltering nostalgia.) All fake, but harmless, and highly entertaining.

Now, on the Internet, anyone who has the slightest taint of non-reality, is probably monitored by most of the world’s Intelligence(?) Agencies. They might even be reading this! Who knows? Everything is cast with the darkest shadows. The innocence (and fun) has been lost.

And it is really hard to type with an outrageous fake foreign accent. Vot does you tink. Nah!

[If there are any Harold and Mildred fans still out there, then you will be pleased to know that the lovebirds celebrated their 50th Anniversity. Or was that their 100th?]