NET RESULTS:Trying to remember an age before mobile phones or e-mail is becoming increasingly difficult, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

IF YOU are old enough you may remember a time when you didn’t live an on-demand life. For anyone under the age of 20, the concept is probably meaningless. If you are that age, and you grew up in Ireland, at the very least you will have most likely had access to a mobile phone from childhood onwards.

For most, a wide variety of digital communication technologies has also been the norm, from what these days seems to be the relative slowness of e-mail to “always on” discussion formats like instant messaging, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.

Such technologies must enter younger lives quite seamlessly, in the way the latest fad or obsession with a toy, a song or a fashion item swept through my schools in a pre-digital age.

Even for those of us who are older, trying to remember an age before mobile phones or e-mail is becoming increasingly difficult.

I look back now at my years in university and it seems inconceivably strange that we weren’t using mobile phones.

How odd that we managed to study and complete degrees without the extraordinary resources of the internet (on the other hand, we were also spared the blind alleys and red herrings that come with instant access to information that anybody anywhere can place online).

The start of a slippery slope for me – and I’m conscious this makes me sound antediluvian – was the arrival of the phone answering machine. No, not “voicemail” or “message minders”, children, but the actual electronic device you hooked up to your landline (remember land lines?).

I bought one of these from a gigantic discount store when I was living in San Francisco and was amazed that, not only would it answer phone calls, but it would play them back to me over the phone if I was out.

It was a short jump from there to realise that an answering machine was actually a very handy phone-call avoidance machine.

The more practical application was that you could avoid the tyranny of a ringing phone. The answering machine would take the call, and the person could leave a message, so you could take a shower, go down to the shops, or head off to work knowing your little machine was minding the landline.

The corollary of this was that you quickly realised you could also avoid having to talk to certain people. We all have those situations where we need to give somebody a message, but don’t particularly want to talk to them – perhaps because there is a dislike or maybe the person keeps you on the line for an inordinate amount of time.

The answering machine provided the perfect solution: you could ring when you knew the person was at work or away, and just leave a message. Task done, conversation avoided.

Now we have any number of additional technologies that we try to juggle with in our lives. First came e-mail and, with it, the assumption of constant out-of-hours availability. For working people this technology, while wonderful in many ways, quickly began to seem oppressive. Colleagues, the boss, managers and clients could e-mail at any time in hours outside of work and you’d be expected to respond.

Mobile phones, once they became ubiquitous, began to have the same stranglehold on our lives. We have a strange relationship with our mobiles – most people will express frustration that we have become permanently available at all hours by carrying them on our person.

Yet if you’ve ever left your mobile at home by accident you’ve probably experienced that blind feeling of panic that is somewhat akin to those disconcerting dreams where you find yourself in a public place surrounded by people you know and you realise you aren’t wearing any clothes.

Not having their mobile to hand for an entire day can make many people feel stripped bare and vulnerable.

And now, of course, we are in the era of social networking, where, thanks to our mobile phones and downloadable apps, we can go beyond the individual phone call and let crowds of others know exactly what we’re thinking and doing via Twitter, Facebook, chat, and all the services that come everywhere with us on our mobiles.

For many this is not just a perfectly comfortable state of affairs but networking heaven. For others, even those who began as enthusiasts, the degree to which we are now expected to be constantly available and reachable through all these technologies is exasperating and overwhelming.

Curiously, the answer could lie in the technologies themselves. Think back to the answering machine: having devices and services that can take and store messages for you means you don’t have to take the calls yourself, at least not every single one.

Yet people don’t seem to want to use their technologies as a tool to limit accessibility. We’ve all heard them, the people who answer their mobile phones when they’re in a public toilet stall. A more polite variation is the rest of us who go on holiday with our laptops and our mobiles and feel obliged to deal with work matters.

We like to blame the technologies. But to a large degree we enslave ourselves.

klillington@irishtimes.com

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