on 16 March 2007According to the Government’s ‘emotional literacy’ advisers, children who put their feelings into words are less likely to have mental health problems. That’s why they should spend more time in group therapy instead of those boring reading and writing classes.
It’s true that putting things into words seems to be a dying art – whole words, that is, not the bits you text. But every schoolchild should know that words can cause as many problems as they solve. Apple and Apple have only just resolved a 30-year battle over the first one most kids learn.
There’s something about digital media that provokes these childish scraps. At the time of writing, Sky is threatening to grab its channels off the new kid, Virgin Media, unless it hands over more of its pocket money. Customers of the cable network formerly known as ntl:Telewest – already disoriented by having bits of their service rebranded at random on a daily basis by bored Virgin employees – could soon see Bart Simpson’s shorts disappearing over the horizon, presumably with a retro iris-out effect. This is a matter of no little concern to those of us who rarely manage to eat Sunday lunch with our offspring as recommended by Government advisers, but can reliably be found at 7pm piling onto the sofa in a mirror image of our yellow-faced role models. Check it out – satirical cartoons are the new parenting, education ministry dudes!
By way of compensation, Branson’s mob have given us Virgin Central. This new channel offers a dazzling range of UK and US hits currently totalling nearly six. The innovative part is that the channel has no schedule, so you can watch each programme whenever you like, thus pissing away whatever remains of the network’s bandwidth and overloading its servers, resulting in yet another re-run of the cult classic ‘Attention: This Service Is Not Currently Available’.
You have to wonder if the dodgy quality of digital TV, previously remarked on in this column, is now a topic of conversation in the Branson household. ‘Darling, you know this cable thing you bought? Why is it that when anything moves around on the screen or goes a bit dark, it looks as if somebody dropped a big box of pixels and is trying to put them back in the right order before anyone notices?’ ‘I don’t know, why don’t you check on the Telewest support page?’ ‘I would, but it just redirects to this Virgin Media site that moans about Sky.’
Apart from Matt Groening’s output, the only good reason to mourn the passing of Murdoch One is its Oscars coverage. At least we got this year’s. The surprise of the night – and no, it wasn’t a crowd of naïve and excitable Brits ill-advisedly rushing into a hostile theatre on an empty promise from the Americans, we’ve seen that before in the Middle East – was Martin Scorsese blagging an Oscar so belated and inappropriate that it was all too obviously the panegyric equivalent of a mercy shag.
Like Apple’s lawyers, Scorsese had waited three decades for this, which made it all the more poignant to see the next day’s Times Online announce: ‘Scorcese finally gets his Oscar.’ At last, the world had officially recognised him, but it still couldn’t spell his name. It’s tempting to suggest that the paper’s reputation as the news organ of record and ambassador of the English language may have suffered during its ownership by that same Rupert ‘It Was The Sun Wot Won It’ Murdoch, but this is more a sign of the times than the Times. It’s surely no coincidence that the word ‘crossword’ no longer appears on the home page.
There’s a big fat link to Sudoku, though. The universal language of numbers is in, and real language is out. Like the fact that we’re importing puzzles from the Far East along with all our other technologies, that’s partly a symptom of globalisation. What’s the point in searching for the perfect iambic pentameter to express your admiration for Cillit Bang when it’s only going to be dubbed into Polish? But it’s also a colossal failure of imagination. Hence cyberspace’s other recent legal drama: two giant corporations fighting over who gets to call their phone, wait for it, iPhone.
A century ago, when marketing as we know it was in its infancy, you wouldn’t have seen a famous showman like Steve Jobs naming a proprietary product by sticking one letter on the front. No, back when trademarks were trademarks, Steve would have bounded into the arc lights, whipped off his top hat, produced his new invention from it with a flourish of starched cuffs, and in a sonorous baritone announced the public availability of the Apple Computational Corporation’s Patent Buttonless Vitreous Galvanic Audio-Telegram and Chromophotographic Apparatus. Which would have been fine until he checked and found someone else had already registered that as a dotcom.
Words – they’ll screw you up every time. I’m teaching my youngsters to express their feelings as IP addresses. I know you’re thinking that’s going to store up problems for the future, but don’t worry: they’re 128-bit.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper