Ron McMillan's Blog
Digital Wins Hands Down
Near-horizontal in a room with old-fashioned ceiling cornices so familiar that I could just about reproduce them from memory was an odd time to experience something of an epiphany. Here was an interior defaced by four decades of negative associations encompassing everything from feigned indifference to eye-flashing indignation, ritual humiliation and yep, even pant-threatening trepidation – and I was having original thoughts.
I don’t normally associate visits to the family dentist with the entertainment of epiphanies.
The moment when the good Mr Torquemada set aside blunt instruments and rotated a computer flatscreen to show me the exact state of peril affecting St Mirren was a real eye-opener. Never mind if one whole side of my face was rendered rubbery by the wonders of anaesthesia.
I may not even be atypical in my information-sourcing habits, in that I almost certainly get the vast majority of it from the Internet, including checking football league rankings from a dentist chair.
Never mind the absence of revelations there, then, but it was the next thought in the process that came as a surprise.
I read a lot, surely more than your average middle-aged Scot. And now, it dawns upon me that, of all the written material that this reader consumes, far more of it lives on computers than exists anywhere on paper.
In track of meaningful news, I pore over websites belonging to the Guardian, the BBC, the Independent and sometimes the Telegraph and the London Times (even I can appreciate reading the other side of a story, once in a while). From across the Atlantic, a still different set of viewpoints awaits us from the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times (whose Pulitzer-winning motoring columnist, Dan Neil, leaves every one of his more showy British competitors in the shade).
If I want to focus upon the latest developments in digital photography, DPReview.com out of London does so with an appropriately anal attention to unimportant technical detail (even if its proprietor remains unable to write in sentences), while from the USA the more specialist (and opinionated) creator of the Luminous Landscape brings a degree of authenticity to his treatment of the professional end of the spectrum.
When facts and figures no longer hold my attention, a real source of satirical pleasure is The Onion; I have nothing but contempt for fellow Britons who maintain the pompous fallacy that our cousins across the water are somehow irony-impaired – and a visit to this work of genius is all I need to rest my case.
For now at least, the only words that come to me in printed form arrive in books (blessed be the British libraries), but my Internet readings assure me that even that source is now under threat. If a recent article in the rather excellent Hi-Arts website out of Highland Scotland is to be believed, then this reader’s complete conversion to digital text may not be so very far away.