Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

Run for your digital life!

"At my sporting club I don't use a running machine anymore. I jack into my Technogym 700," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article on the digital age and the gym. "This is an awesome high-tech machine, a sleek black treadmill for alpha geeks. When did getting fit turn into a video game?"

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How I changed the face of British politics

"The web has enabled me, an armchair socialist, to take a small, tottering digital step into the smouldering wreckage of real-life politics," writes Michael Parson in a comment article about 10 Downing Street's e-petitions. "After nine years of having my heart broken by a misguided idealist who led Britain into an illegal and unjust war, I stuck it to Tony"

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What makes television television?

"I remember back in the 1980s, my friends who worked in TV production were unimpresssed by the appearance of cheap, easy-to-use video cameras," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article about video on the web. "Scroll forward 20 years and the cameras have got cheaper and lighter, the editing software even simpler, the bandwidth to share the content is cheaply available, and companies like YouTube have made it easy for people to share content"

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There's a phone booth on the corner…

"It's generally considered a good idea to know where you are at all times, apart from occasional lapses due to alcohol or passion," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article about global positionsing systems. "Technology is now making it increasingly easy for everyone else to know where you are as well."

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Only connect electronically

"Social networking is one of the building blocks of the Web 2.0 dream: bringing together like-minded people online to create a community of interest that can share knowledge, information and resources and make useful contacts," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article on connecting electronically. " However, we must not forget its older, fleshly incarnation – the real networking event. During the height of the dotcom boom you had to fight off invitations to internet networking events."

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When did the future shock you?

"I once presented my grandmother with a CD of insipid choral music while she was sitting out a bout in hospital," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article about the way technology can shock. "I proudly put the CD down on the hospital table in front of her, hoping she'd be pleased I'd remembered she liked it. She looked at in confusion, and said, "Does the music come out of that?"

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So you want to start an online business

"At this point even the most cynical will probably concede that this internet thing is going to be around for a while. For good or ill, the audience is moving online, which means the people who serve the audience have to move with them, whether they're selling TV, baked beans, or words," writes Michael Parsons. He goes on to give five golden rules for anyone thinking of entering e-commerce. The first, encouragingly, is "You have no idea what you're getting into."

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Never trust a webbed politician

"Watching politicians getting excited about technology is always an embarrassing experience," writes Michael Parsons in this week's column. "The manifest insincerity of their attempts to pull on geekish robes is physically painful to anyone who knows what's really going on."

What provoked this rant is, of course, David Cameron's much heralded video weblog, but our correspondent is not impresed. "I suspect Cameron's entire generation are going to have to die before the bluff amateur ho-ho-ho pin stripe anti-intellectual technocontempt of him and his ilk has been bred out of the establishment gene pool," he concludes.

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Beware the technology of cool

"Where is Jarvis Cocker, to show his bared-arsed contempt for this ghastly smugness?" asks Michael Parsons in his latest column, railing against the pseudo-cool of Apple and its chief executive, Steve Jobs. "I couldn’t quite figure out why this made my flesh creep so much, until that old line came into my head, "never trust a hippy capitalist." Absolutely. Steve, you’re beautiful. And we’re beautiful. And that’ll be 200 quid please."

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Get your online real fake teenage girls!

"The drama of lonelygirl15, a beautiful teenage video diarist type on YouTube, is only the most recent soap opera to hit the net," writes Michael Parsons in this week's column. "Much of this debate is concerned with two powerful forces around which virtual culture constantly circulates: authenticity and intimacy. If you wade through the thousands of comments (and much spam) appended to Bree's video diaries, many writers appear to feel they're in direct connection with her. Others angrily accuse her of abusing the YouTube community by presenting fake material as real."

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When you wish upon a StarTAC

"Should five and six-year-old children have their own mobile phones?" asks Michael Parsons in his weekly column for Times Online. He's not surprised that they might want one: "The mobile phone, like the car keys, the TV remote control, Mummy's handbag and Daddy's gin and tonic, is one of the things we invest with value through the grace of our attention. Kids see that we're obsessed with phones and they are keen to share our obsession."

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