C’est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell!
My last few articles have been laced with a certain admiration for technology, an admiration that our glorious editor seems to think is a fleeting one*. Technology and I are still going strong enough though, no matter what they say. The worst thing that has happened to me in the past few weeks was the fact that on the morning of a presentation I forgot my memory stick with the power point on it, and technology cannot be blamed for human error. Speaking of human error, I recently attended a student march against the reintroduction of fees. While making my merry way towards the end of the march to listen to the usual rousing speeches that accompany these events I got a text message from a friend telling me that some of our other friends were currently occupying a government building. So I made my way through the crowd, bumped into a few other friends as we made our way over to the building.
Now the official version of what happened next is currently being written so I don’t want to get into any libel territory here by saying who did what, who was wrong or right or whatever. What I will say was that one of the most amazing things that I say was the amount of people holding camera phones and recording everything that was happening. Not to mention the entire posse of “have a go” photographers, they were everywhere. At one stage I thought I was more likely to be trampled on by some camera wielding psychopath than a horse, and that was just the ones on the ground. All around me, office buildings and shop roofs were littered with these people, trying to get the best angles and best snaps, how none of them fell out of a second story window I will never know, especially because I don’t really understand physics all that well, but I suppose you have to admire their commitment.
But then after the commitment comes the validation. YouTube, Facebook, Indymedia, and even RTÉ felt the full force of the barrage of mega pixels and mega bytes. You honestly couldn’t click without coming across an image or a video of what happened. It was total proliferation, but the interesting thing was the selective editing and presentation from all around to give the “real” version of events. Now I was there, I only have 2 eyes, so do most of my friends, but it would be impossible for us to give a full comprehensive account of what happened, we would actually be reliant upon some of the videos and images. See there I am dependent on technology. And anyone else that has a case to pursue afterwards is going to be using technology to its full capacity to make their cases. It’s amazing; an eye witness testimony now is testimony through a camera lens, madness!
But then again, technology is not independent, it’s controlled by people. It’s open to abuse and that’s sad, I’d feel bad for it, except I know that it doesn’t have feelings and so there’s not much point. Although that doesn’t stop me saying sorry to my phone any time I drop it. I can really see myself looking at possible ways that we can co-exist with technology. But the thing about that is, technology just keeps re-inventing itself, or rather people keep re-inventing it. So maybe I’m not tech phobic at all, maybe I just don’t’ like people! Perish the thought.
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Some photographs are the property of Fiach O’Neill
*Editorial Note – Call it a journalist’s intuition!
