Too Old To Rock And Roll, Too Young To Die

It would seem that all this technology is bad for us after all.

D'dya -- tell me something I don't know..

As our first world economies have made us all into 'knowledge workers' over the last 20 years, we're a generation of RSI sufferers and sedentary borderline diabetics with decidedly gooey front-ends.

And as technology has followed us from the office to the home, and media has become social, we're indulging in new kinds of bad habits, equally as unhealthy as smoking cigarettes or conkering -- it would seem.

Dr Aric Sigman's report published in the journal of the Institute of Biology made headlines recently. In it he postulates that social media is leading to a lack of "real" social networking involving personal interaction, which could have biological effects by altering the way genes work, upsetting immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and mental performance.

Eeks, I could be in big trouble -- but maybe there's hope..

I can claim to have once been to technology what my old employer terms a fast forward -- or 'early adopter' to those of you better accustomed to more accepted marketing demographic speak.

I first got online in 1993 using Mosaic and doing limited navigation via Bigfoot, AltaVista and Excite and kept up-to-date with news through CompuServe. In 1995 I 'upgraded' to Netscape and even though it took 20 minutes to load a page -- many of which I recall were devoted to The X Files -- I was hooked by this new-fangled Information Super Highway thing.

Check all those extinct brands..

Practically everything I've bought over the last decade has been done online and I eschewed the limitations of a landline phone for mobile in 1999 -- just around the time that I had my first ISDN box installed.

My iPod adoption came at the introduction of Apple's first 40Gb model -- 3rd gen', I think -- back in 2001 and I've been Web 2.0 and blogging this pointlessness since 2006.

All of my physical media is in storage and the 6,000+ albums I own are digitized, backed-up and backed-up again. My TV is totally on-demand and I got my personal email early enough to have it whole name without any appended digits.

I love my iPhone and in equal measure hate my Blackberry. I bought an XBox at launch -- but only to play Halo. The upgrade to a 360 was necessary only to indulge in the last in the Master Chief trilogy. Previously, I was in a monogamous five-year relationship with GoldenEye on Nintendo.

However, in recent years I've fallen behind.

I don't have a Facebook or Bebo presence (well, I kinda-do, but didn't progress beyond initial sign-up), I don't RSS, FriendFeed, Twitter, Scrobble, Wibble or Jigger. (I made-up the latter two). I prefer the implied 'ownership' of iTunes over the free and legal lending libraries of Last.fm and Spotify. And my beautiful designer Danish telly ain't HD-ready and is nearly old enough to sit its GCSEs.

So, have I gone as far as I'm going to with technology?

Hell no, but I'm certainly no longer blazing the trail.

And looking at all this stuff -- music, movies, gaming, communication and information -- it occurs to me that none of it really knits together very well, exposing the long-held promise of the networked home as a sham.

..One day it may one day work together, maybe, but certainly no time soon.

As demonstration of my now confirmed status as technology laggard, I get very confused by Internet and texting shorthand.

I was recently a bit surprised, marginally embarrassed but vaguely complimented when I misread the acronym LOL in an email from a female colleague. I interpreted LOL to mean an inappropriately familiar 'Lots Of Love', instead of the correctly informal 'Laugh Out Loud'.

So, in the spirit of 'don't quit quitting' and for the good of my health, I'm off to dust off those long-forgotten LPs, write a letter -- with a pen and ink -- and pick-up the phone instead of pinging a tweet.

:-p