Hold on a moment, I want some new technology that lasts

By Richard Morrison

As John Updike once sourly but accurately observed, these days we are all conditioned to accept newness, whatever it costs.[1] Very soon, no doubt, Apple’s tablet will seem as an essential tool of modern living to us as the electric trouser-press did to our grandparents.[2] At least, it will until someone manufactures an even smarter, thinner and more essential tablet. Which, if recent history is any guide, will be in approximately six months’ time.

And that’s the bewildering[3] thing, isn’t it? Turn your back for a moment and you find that every electronic item in your possession is as dated as a mildewed tombstone.[4] Which wouldn’t be so bad in itself. Why should you care if people snigger because you use a mobile phone that actually predates Barack Obama’s presidency? [5]

But try getting the thing repaired when it goes wrong. It’s like walking into a pub and asking for a Dubonnet and lemonade.[6] You will be made to feel like some sort of time-traveller from the 1970s. “Don’t you want an upgrade?” you will be asked, incredulously.[7] “It’s not worth repairing that old thing.”

And so the mountain of dumped electrical debris grows.[8] A few years ago a satirically-minded sculptor constructed a gigantic statue made from the exact number of electronic goods that an average British person was estimated to discard in a lifetime.[9] It weighed three tons, stood 7ft high, and included five fridges, eight toasters, six microwaves, seven PCs, six TVs, 12 kettles, seven vacuum cleaners and 35 mobile phones.[10]

Even then, the calculation seemed on the conservative[11] side. Only 35 mobiles? In a lifetime? As every parent knows, any teenager will get through at least five phones each year. One will drown in the pocket of a pair of jeans chucked[12] in the washing machine. One will be lent to a girlfriend who has moved to Ipswich. One will be stolen during PE[13]. One will be left on a bus. And one will be accidentally flushed down the loo of a dodgy club in Camden Town.[14]

The enormous number of electronic items now regularly chucked out by British families is clearly one big problem. But this ceaseless discarding of gadgets has other consequences.[15] It contributes greatly, I think, to the uneasy feeling that modern life is whizzing[16] by faster than we can keep up. By the time I’ve learnt how to use a gadget it’s already broken, lost or redundant[17]. I’ve lost count of the number of TV remote-control thingies that I’ve bought, mislaid and replaced without working out what most of the buttons did.[18]

And the technology changes so bewilderingly fast—not least in the media world. Was it only 30 years ago that I saw my great predecessor William Mann (the music critic of The Times who famously declared the Beatles to be the finest songwriters since Schubert) sitting in the newspaper’s canteen after a concert and writing his review—with a fountain-pen![19] —for that night’s edition? And was it less than years ago that I spotted a high-powered businessman friend towing what seemed to be either a large crate or a small nuclear bomb on wheels through a railway station.[20] “Good grief[21],” I exclaimed. “What have you got in there? Your money or your wife?”

“Neither,” he replied, with the smug look of a man who knows he’s at the cutting-edge[22] of technology, no matter how ridiculous he looks. “This is what everyone will have soon—even you. It’s called a mobile telephone.”

I don’t lament[23] the pace of change. On the contrary, I’m dazzled by those high-tech designers who can somehow fit a camera, music-player, computer, phone and satellite navigation system into a plastic slab no bigger than a packet of fags.[24] Or invent a vacuum cleaner such as the one recently showed to me that can suck fluff straight into a dustbin via a system of pipes in your house walls.[25] (All you have to do is rebuild your entire home.) If the geniuses who dreamt up that could also find a way to keep the Tube[26] running on the first snowy day of winter, they would be making real progress for humanity.

What I do regret, however, is the built-in instant obsolescence[27] of so many household items. My parents bought a wooden wireless[28] in 1947, the year they were married. If 1973, the year I went to university, it was still pumping out[29] Family Favourites and The World at One. It sat in the kitchen like an old friend—which, in a way, it was. It certainly spoke to us more than we spoke to each other on some grumpy[30] mornings.

True, it had idiosyncrasies[31]. You had to know exactly how to tickle its knobs or tweak its dials to conjure discernible speech and music from the crackle.[32] But that was its mystique[33]. When my mum replaced it with a new-style radio that could also play cassette-tapes (gosh, remember them?) I felt a real sense of loss.

Such is the frenetic turnover of 21st-century technology that there’s no time to forge emotional bonds. Even if Apple’s new wonder-toys turn out to be the most significant tablets since the big ones that Moses dragged down the mountain[34], I very much doubt that they will resist the here-today-gone-tomorrow trend.