Changed by Technology
I have spent precisely 30 years doing the same job in the same industry. But the way in which I do it has been shaped by technological developments.
I am writing this on the day that marks the 30th anniversary of my first day of self-employment.
On 12 May 1990, I got married. My wife and I went on honeymoon for two weeks; and I went back to the magazine publishing company I had worked for just long enough to return my company car before starting out on my own.
On 1 June 1990, I sat on a newly-purchased chair at a newly-purchased desk looking at a newly-purchased computer I’d had built (ask your parents) while a fax machine squeaked and squawked in the corner.
It would be another two years until I got a mobile phone (a hulking beast that was wired permanently into my car). Another five years until I had an email address; and probably ten more after that until I contracted my first (and, as yet, incurable) dose of social media.
Marking Time
I am always intrigued by the way that books and movies use audio or visual shorthand to evoke a moment or a period in time: the leather jackets and slicked hair setting The Outsiders squarely in the “greaser” culture of the 1960s; the sounds of David Bowie and T-Rex setting the Life on Mars TV show in the grimy midst of early 1970s Britain.
Nowhere — in my opinion — is this visual shorthand better deployed than in the movie Shawshank Redemption and the Stephen King novella — Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption — upon which it is based. The passage of time is marked by the poster pinned to the prison cell wall of central character, Andy Dufresne. When he first arrives at the prison, it is the Rita Hayworth of the novella’s title that adorns his wall. Rita Hayworth gives way to Seven Year Itch-era Marilyn Monroe as the movie progresses into the 1950s. By the time of Dufresne’s redemption, the poster is of Raquel Welch in all her 1966 One Million Years BC finery.
Looking back over three decades of self-employment, it is clear that changes in technology provide the shorthand for my passing years. Those changes haven’t just shaped and simplified the way in which I work; they have defined and dictated the very way in which I earn a living.
Remote Reporting
In March 1990, I was sent — as a junior reporter — to Las Vegas to cover an exhibition; a notebook (the paper kind) and a 35 mm camera by my side. I spent the first two days running (literally) around the exhibition showground, gathering information and taking photos. On the third day, I sat in the show’s press office at a manual typewriter to write about all that I had seen. The dozen or so A4 pages of copy I had produced were then faxed back to the UK to be retyped by some poor unfortunate soul. Meanwhile I was negotiating with an international courier to take several rolls of black and white film back to the UK for processing. On the fifth day, I spent more than an hour on the telephone, instructing the magazine’s layout artist which photos went with which bit of copy. The resulting paper magazine was printed — mistakes and all — while I was still in the US.
In March this year, just before the COVID-19 lockdown took effect in the US, I revisited the same exhibition. And I broadcast the entire thing live with a smartphone.
Vinyl to iTunes
Looking back over the three decades that have elapsed since I took the bold decision to work for myself, I can trace a technological evolution that has accompanied my slow but increasingly rapid ageing.
I already owned vinyl album copies of Vienna by Ultravox and ABC’s Lexicon of Love. But the used car I had purchased as I took my first tentative steps into the realm of the self-employed had a cassette player; and so both albums were purchased again on tape. A few years later, with business booming, that car was upgraded to one equipped with a CD player. Both albums were repurchased in that format too. I would buy them again in MP3 format and again via iTunes when the age of the smartphone dawned. Over the years, I have at least partly funded the retirement plans of both Midge Ure and Martin Fry.
Yet that 30-year evolution appears positively pedestrian in comparison to the way in which advances in technology have shaped and reshaped my professional career.
When I first became a reporter, the magazine for which I worked was printed on paper and sent out to 40,000+ faceless individuals each week. We had no idea who (if anyone) actually read it. Reader feedback was minimal and letters to the editor were — at least occasionally — fabricated.
With the arrival of the Internet and online publishing, we suddenly had a better understanding of just how many (or how few) people were actually reading the words over which we had sweated collectively. Reader feedback in the form of online comments began as sniping an criticism and led to me gaining an online stalker for about two years. But this too has matured; and while the keyboard warriors of old still exist, they have been mostly replaced by well-intentioned and polite discourse and debate.
Scribbling barely legible notes onto scraps of paper gave way to using a voice recorder to allow me to engage more fully with my interviewee. Soon I would cut out the middle man and, rather than transcribing possibly hours of conversation, I was turning these discussions into insightful, long-form podcasts.
Black and white film photography gave way to colour and then digital photography. Digital photography begat video production with 4k cameras and drones.
My position has changed. I have moved from behind a typewriter to behind a computer; to behind a microphone and behind a camera; to in front of a camera broadcasting live to a watching audience.
Stories that once took a week or even a month to move from notebook to magazine are now delivered instantly. Those fictitious letters to the editor have been replaced by real-time conversation with viewers around the world. There is no longer a question about who or if anyone is watching because I can now see my audience almost as well as they see me.
When the COVID-19 crisis hit and it became clear that I would be unable to produce my magazines in the usual way, I created a LiveStream show. I had never done it before. But after a few days of stumbling about in the dark, I went on to produce 56 shows in 67 days, reaching an audience of well over half a million people in more than 100 countries around the world.
None of what I have done in the past 10 years of business would have been possible without technology.
Moving to the Slow Lane
All of this makes me sound like a geek; an early adopter that has ridden the crest of a technological wave and who enjoys a place at the very cutting edge of media developments. Once, perhaps,. But in business, as in life, I am conscious of that hat slipping.
I am now of an age that speaks to — as Bob Marley put it “good friends we had and good friends we lost, along the way.” My memory for faces — like my memory for long-lost song lyrics — thankfully remains strong. My memory for names, however, is sketchy at best. I can draw upon a lifetime of useless information but I can no longer vouch for its source or its validity. And yet the part of my brain devoted to storing snubs, insults and snipes — perceived or otherwise — can harbour grudges years and even decades after the reason has been forgotten.
There was a time when I felt entirely in tune with music and fashion. The truth now is that I couldn’t pick Arianna Grande out of a line-up and I tend to wear the same pair of vintage brogues pretty much every day.
I owned each of the first five iPhone models, marvelling at the incremental improvements that each delivered. Today, there is an iPhone 8 in my pocket and I can see no good reason to change or upgrade.
This article was written on an Apple Mac computer. But that gleaming machine shares an office with a fully-functioning manual typewriter. On the (very, and increasingly) rare occasions I write a cheque, I do so with a fountain pen I have owned for as long as I have been self-employed.
I am losing my grip on modernity. But I am clinging on. I was unable to retain my youthful athleticism; my naïve belief that music could change the world; and my hair. You will have to prise my technology from my cold, dead hands.
Mark Anthony is the editor of DemolitionNews.com
