Old: When people don’t recognise your cultural influences

When your teenage heroes appear in the obituary columns on a regular basis, when you have to ask people to repeat themselves (whether or not it was because they spoke too fast or in abbreviated form) or when people offer you their seat on the tube, you realise you are getting old.  But when you try to make a witty statement at work, describing your one man team as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the response is “Who?” you realise that you have actually achieved the status of ‘old’.

For the enlightenment of my colleagues, none of whom was aware of Douglas Adam’s creation in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ex-Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox hatched grand schemes with the assistance of his ‘team’, a second Zaphod Beeblebrox head sprouting from his shoulders.   I have to admit that before the advent of CGI, the image was pretty awful, but with a bit of ‘suspension of disbelief’ you could accept that such a being could, possibly, exist.

I wasn’t a massive fan of Hitchhiker, but, along with most people of my generation, I was at least aware of it’s theme, the main characters and the basic storyline.  I suppose there was such relatively little content on radio, television and film in my youth, it was easy to be reasonably au fait with a large proportion of that content.  But with the proliferation of radio and television stations, and the massive growth of film studios throughout the world, together with an ability to access it all at the touch if a digital button, it must be difficult to avoid being selective.

Even listening to modern music (which all sounds the same to me, in general terms), we are required to choose between ‘House’, ‘Garage’, ‘Drum and Base’ and multitudes of other variations on the delivery of twelve semitones across a number of octaves by musical instruments that have not changed wildly in the past few decades.  Why are we required to nail our musical preferences to one particular mast?  Because there’s so much of it, we can’t possibly include everything in our taste collection?  Either that or the world’s addiction to sound bites, Excecutive Summaries, bullet points  and dumming down has reduced the ability of our brains to store more than a few megabytes of acquired information.

This is where my SCUI (Spinal Column USB Interface) will make a difference.  In the next few months I’ll be launching a Crowd Funding Appeal for the development and production of a range of memory enhancing products, ranging from a neural implant interface with USB4 inputs to implanted SSDs of various capacities and Bluetooth enabled devices. Unless, of course, Apple have already patented my innovative idea and intend interfacing their iMemory with the iPhone and Apple Watch to synchronise on the iCloud.  I can’t really imagine that old iTim thought of it first!