THE TRANSITION AGES

History will record a very odd portion of time, sandwiched between technological ages. It didn’t last long - perhaps six years at most, somewhere between the end of the Twentieth Century and the invention of the iPhone.

You might remember it yourself. It was an exciting time: tech was converging, slowly at first, perhaps without even a guiding hand, but evidently coming together in a sort of inexorable evolution.

Before it did converge though, for those few odd years in the 2000s, New Year’s Eve was always alive and beeping. Everybody everywhere sent Happy New Year text messages to each other’s Nokia 3310s, and at midnight, as Big Ben donged and the fireworks popped, the UK mobile network was typically flooded with SMS messages.

I mean flooded. Sometimes they didn’t get through until 3am. It would have been faster to scribble a Happy New Year in Trafalgar Square and deliver it personally.

I was marvelling tonight about how that just doesn’t happen any more. For one thing, as the technology converged around the smart-phone, the networks got better at handling mass traffic. Those phones used the Internet, not masts and relays. By then of course, social media (Web 2.0) had merged onto the tech as well, and gave us multiple new ways to wish multiple people a Happy New Year, all at once. And then instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal made it even more diverse, and yes, frighteningly easy to contact anyone, anywhere in the world.

And so that strange little period of time at the beginning of the century will look so hopeful and marvellous to those future historians. To think that we had dash-mounted satnavs, iPods and MP3 players, mobile phones, dial up Internet on our dad’s PC, and even television sets… and we hadn’t yet put them all together? It must have been dizzying to see that happen in such a short space of time!

Well, dizzying perhaps. I don’t miss being woken up by a pinging phone in the early hours of January 1st. I’ll wish my chums and colleagues a happy new year when I see them I think.

Sammy and I watched the fireworks exploding around us from my front room. The sky echoed and cracked with light, flashing with bursts of brilliant white over thick sulphurous clouds. There were colours too - a flower of red, tumbling blues and purples, cascading palms of green and gold.

I do think it will be happy. We’ll be getting married this year. I think it will be new too, after all, 2021 was a bit of a year of closure for me. There are new adventures ahead. 

And it will of course be a year. I can’t say where I’ll be in these 365 days. I can’t tell you how many sunrises I’ll see or which season will bring which challenge, but it will be a complete year for sure.

History might well record that weird little transition between the plastic age and the digital age. It could be that future historians get excited about micro-transitions when things moved faster than the tech required to make them happen. It could be. But personally, this year looks like it’s a year of transition between epochs for me too. And like I lived through the early 2000s with my Nokia 3310 and my iPod in separate pockets, I kind of hope I get a sense of where it’s going and how cool the future looks when good things come very naturally together.