Peter Zelaskowski, Barcelona, December 2002
It’s eleven and yet another stunningly beautiful Barcelona autumn morning. I’ve just watched, albeit on a credit card sized and somewhat overly sensitive (stop moving Kirsty) screen, last night’s Newsnight. Now I’m sitting listening to John Gaunt on BBC Radio London slagging off the striking fireman and Cherie Blair. How about a slice of whispering Bob Harris, or last week’s The News Quiz, ad infinitum, because there is an infinity of freely available radio and, to a lesser extent, television from all over the globe. If you miss your favourite, no problem, because programmes are stored and are (24/7) just a click away.
Now it’s two in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll give my mate Adam a ring. He lives in Santiago in Chile and will just be getting up. That’ll cost, I hear you thinking. No, actually not a bean more than the monthly payments to which I’ve already committed myself, because we’ll do it videoconferencing. We can sit and share endless cups of e-tea without worrying about the cost.
The government wants to link every school and GP practice to broadband by the year 2006. However, unlike for myself and people like me, I don’t think it’s all that clear what schools and doctors can get out of the Internet, broadband or not. Okay, having all patient records online and accessible from any practice, may be of some use to the more mobile patient in need of attention away from home. Online consultations may, but it’s not at all obvious to me that it will, cut down the number of non-attenders, as Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry & E-Commerce Minister hopes. But, will these innovations do anything to cut waiting lists and times? Schools are full to bursting with underused and unused hardware. Teachers are often untrained in IT or simply don’t have the time to integrate the technology into their working practice in any meaningful way. So, come to think of it who is really benefiting from the introduction of broadband?
One of the great losses that I’ve had to struggle with since arriving here in Spain is my daily fix of media. Many years of media dependency, “one of the lesser addictions”, as I once heard it referred to by a psychoanalyst, ranging from waking up with the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, to falling asleep on the sofa in front of Newsnight, the daily paper somewhere in between, carried about London on my working travels. And, in desperate search for equivalents here, I quickly found that Spanish TV has too few highs and far too many lows and, what’s gradually become clearer, now my Spanish has reached a level where I can actually tune in, is that this isn’t a language problem. We may have crap weather in dear old blighty but at least we’ve evolved some decent entertainment for our sad indoor lives.
At the time I arrived in Spain 3 years ago the Internet dot.com revolution was red hot, reshaping every corner of our private and public lives and changing the world beyond recognition. Nobody knew exactly where it was going but things would never be the same again. The e-giants were all going for broke for the big profits that were assuredly theirs for the taking. E-commerce would sweep away the high streets and malls from the A-to-Z of our daily routine. Now, of course, we know better. Barring only a small number of notable exceptions, massive e-investment has seen and continues to see zero returns and, as rapidly as the twin towers, internet optimism and e-commerce share values have collapsed.
At the height of dot.com fever, I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. E-mail was great sure, definitely progress and much better than snail-mail, particularly for rapidly traversing the distance I’d newly placed between myself and my friends and family. Sure, I’d even booked flights on the internet. What always felt less clearly like progress was all the mass of information I had free access to, that was adding no value to my life. In the early days, until even fairly recently, it felt like such a massively frustrating test of patience, surmounting all the problems involved in ‘surfing the web’. Just getting a line was enough of a drain, like surfing without waves ... or water. Real Internet surfing was as much like the promoted idealised fantasy of web surfing, as surfing on water is like those Old Spice ads of yesteryear, with the sole muscular surfer effortlessly riding a fifty-foot wave. Somehow the language of the Internet has always been as bloated as dot.com share values once were. What with all the unsolicited advertising, the technical hitches, the 404 messages, the wrong turns, the viruses....the ‘information super-highway’ has always felt more like a remote muddy country lane being crossed by a herd of cows swarming with flies. So, like many I slowly switched off. Gave-up on the idea of using my computer as a newspaper. Great, I could access the Guardian and the Mirror but it was so time-consuming and such a drag!! Plus it meant having to read from a screen and, of course, you can’t sit on the john with your PC. Add to this my dismay to discover things were even worse here in Spain. Telefonica make BT seem accessible, honest and efficient. But then along came broadband.
The arrival of broadband seems to be restoring some of the earlier optimism. But once again, is this optimism misplaced and once again only serving the purpose of channeling much needed resources towards IT manufacturers and away from where they are needed. For one group, however, the new technologies, particularly with the onset of broadband, are providing benefits that do not exist for the ordinary user. In the UK at the moment a potential 67% of the population have access to broadband, and uptake, from the point of view of providers, is worryingly slow: 2.5% of all net users, as opposed to 60% in South Korea. Why should this be? The internet provides little that people need or want or can’t get elsewhere. It doesn’t solve enough of life’s basic problems. But for the homesick expat, the opposite is true. If I lived in London once again, I’d have what I wanted without the internet: most of my friends nearby, the TV, the radio, all the shops. But while I’m here in Barcelona my PC is a cheap and totally new form of telephone, a magnificent radio, an as yet unstable but incredibly diverse telly, and a daily pile of free newspapers, only lacking in the key ingredient of portability. But then, come to think of it, I don’t need to cart mountains of yellowing newspapers to the recycling bin any more.