Integrating into the Digital Community

I have metamorphosed from a digital immigrant into a digital emigrant, recently. My website has not been updated for ages and I haven’t posted a blog in months, the latter fact only partially accounted for by a hard drive failure. I do have a basic mobile phone (pressed on me by my wife) but I rarely use it. Actually, I seldom use a traditional phone.

Having an internet presence has proved worthwhile to some extent: the odd sale has come via my website and an all expenses-paid invitation to exhibit further a field. But there can be disadvantages too. A gallery owner has told me that she regards anything displayed on the ether as not virgin work and not worthy of being exhibited. Then there is the sort of bait that I’ve had from a New York gallery, offering to promote me for a fee. I’m not going to pay to practise as an artist.

A retreat from the computer may be more general as people become aware of the time wasted in front of keyboard and screen addicted to pointless googling. Readers of the philosopher Karl Popper may remember his searchlight theory of the mind about the futility of collecting random facts.

A digital device I do love is my radio. Test Match Special is my favourite working background and I’m able to listen to it without interruption from the Shipping Forecast and the Daily Service. I’m spared outbursts from my wife who seemed to think that the presence of the programme on Radio 4 long wave, was a personalised persecution with which I was somehow involved. Now she has her own digital set which helps to preserve domestic harmony. I only ever watched cricket on television during a coffee break. These days, even if it returned to terrestrial TV, I’m not sure I would be able to get the right channel, now that we have that little black box on top of our set.

I realise that I’m never going to pass myself off as a digital native and there is pride in keeping up ethnic traditions, consulting reference books accumulated over a lifetime, reading print without a light behind it.

But I will still continue to blog from time to time even if it is only to sort out my own thoughts. Looking at the map of my hits, there seems to be a cluster in Alaska. Perhaps Sarah Palin is a fan.