Medium was the message

The rise of TV and mass-media in the '60s prompted this infamous phrase by Marshall McLuhan. Mybe it was childish enthusiasm and neophilia that made him more excited by the genie's bottle than by what came out of it. But the "love of the new" has been with us ever since.

My life as a journalist began just as "desktop publishing" was taking off, which meant that my clackety old typewriter with one missing letter was soon replaced by a silent Apple computer. That was the early '90s. After the paranoia about eye, wrist and back strain which preoccupied us journalists in that early dawn, soon enough I also became infected by technophilia.

We all did, didn't we? My particular obsession was the freedom that computers would bring by shrinking everything into an ever smaller and more portable box. Well, here we are, more than 20 years later, and Apple has just announced it's iCloud, joining and legitimizing the online storage bandwagon. It's finally official: computers and their new best friend the internet allow us to be here, there and everywhere. Our home is in the cloud.

The only problem for me, and maybe others of my generation, is that after endless hours of lost time and data, wrestling with these machines and invariably losing, being dazzled by their seductive new iterations and by all the future-gazing babble and speculation ... after more than two decades of this "distraction", I can't help but conclude that the medium becoming the message was a high price to pay. In pursuit of freedom and productivity, how enslaved and unproductive have we been for much of the time ?

I hope that for my son, already set up with his own Facebook and Gmail accounts, the digital age in which we are now so firmly ensconced, will be a source of truer liberation; a means to an end rather than, simply, the end.