Technology will make fools of us all in the end

Date Published: {J}

There was a joke doing the rounds recently that a DVD of Liverpool’s glory days was for sale – but it would cost €500. The DVD itself was in the bargain bin for a mere fifty cent.....the real cost was the Betamax player you’d need to watch it.

Of course that was before they bought two new strikers called Andy and Lou - Little Britain? - and pocketed a suitcase of Chelski’s roubles but even still it wasn’t quite as clever as the wag who, earlier in the season when the Reds were in the relegation zone, added a few words to the John Lennon statue at Liverpool Airport. The normal inscription was a line from Imagine – ‘above us only sky’ – to which our wit added: ‘below us only West Ham’.

And even if you were a diehard Pool fan, you’d have to laugh – but the only problem was the joke sort of lost its effect when you had to explain to your twelve year old what a Betamax video recorder was. 

Of course in another generation you’ll have to explain what a video recorder of any sort is, because we’ll all have integrated systems that allow you to press a button and save programmes to your little heart’s content.

But for now the fact that there’s more than one generation who never heard of Betamax, and for whom vinyl records are circular things you see in old movies, is quite enough to deal with.

It’s only a matter of time before anyone without a 3D telly will be afraid to invite friends to visit them in case it will show them up as backward or poor.

We’ll all be sitting around like Roy Orbison (they won’t know who he was either, but never mind) with our big dark glasses watching Rory McIllroy cope with the undulations of the Masters greens without leaving the comfort of the couch.

Of course all of the television manufacturers are well advanced with the efforts to build 3D TV’s without the need for glasses at all which should mean two things – very few people will buy the current models because they’ll need a lot of money and a lot of glasses....and ultimately the next generation will laugh at them when the TV’s that don’t require any eyewear become de rigeur.

Anyone who was around in the early seventies will remember the evolution from black and white television to colour which for some was speeded up by a sort of giant green screen over your old telly which was supposed to colour the picture but in actual fact made it look like you were watching it through a coloured vase.

The first time we got colour television, there was horse racing on Sports Stadium on the Saturday. Normally I’m as likely to watch racing as I am to watch cookery shows, but that day I couldn’t take my eyes off the green grass – even though we had it growing up to the window sill outside.

When you tell the kids these stories, they look at you in the way we looked at our parents when they told us about a time when you washed all your clothes by hand.

They love the fact that there wasn’t a remote control and anyway you didn’t need one – there was just RTE and after that the only choice you had was to turn the telly on or off.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.