Left to our own devices
Columnist Peter Edgerton thought TikTok was an intangible, nebulous place that provided a platform for fourteen-year-old girls to perform bedroom dance routines while sporting a rather fetching cat’s whiskers/floppy rabbit ears combo. Apparently, he was mistaken...
Surely, there’s something profoundly disturbing about opening your newspaper in the morning and reading the phrase ‘it was announced today on the national police ... TikTok account’. As far as I understood it hitherto, TikTok was an intangible, nebulous place that provided a platform for fourteen-year-old girls to perform bedroom dance routines while sporting a rather fetching cat’s whiskers/floppy rabbit ears combo. Apparently, I was mistaken. It seems it’s also the chosen medium for the heads of national security to announce their latest plans. Goody gumdrops.
After picking myself up from the cafeteria floor and dusting myself down, I read on. Apparently - according to an official police statement on the teenage dance routine application - we will all soon be able to dispense with our identity cards because - guess what? - all our security details will be available to download onto our telephones using a QR code or black magic or something.
Dear Lord above - is there nothing sacred that can’t be squeezed into these ubiquitous rectangular devices? Everything’s on there from banking details to unwanted rolling news clips. I’ve even got a guitar tuner on mine - how supine is that? There was nothing wrong with the little box tuner I had always used but, according to every man and his dog, the phone version was far superior. It wasn’t, of course. My old tuner, for example, although bandaged together like a Vietnam war veteran, never once showed me an advertisement for men’s hairspray or suggested I learn an anodyne Ed Sheeran song just for fun. Nor, when I was tuning on it, was I ever interrupted by a charming young woman from Paraguay offering a twenty per cent saving on my electricity bill.
Last night a local hard-working waiter came to the pub for a swift pint after a long shift. As he plonked himself down on the bar stool a look of unbridled terror traversed his weary features and I hadn’t even given him the bill yet.
“I’ve left my phone at work,” he gasped. I shrugged.
“Not to worry, you can pick it up tomorrow. The usual?” I glanced up expecting a smile and a nod but, instead, was greeted by an empty space. He’d hot-footed it back to pick up his phone, explaining upon his return a short while later that it was inconceivable that he should be without it for a night. Why? How many guitars did he have to tune before dawn?
A few years ago, I spent a month walking the Camino de Santiago, having purposefully left my phone back at home. Upon my return, I expected to be greeted by an avalanche of frantic messages and missed calls. In the event, absolutely nothing of any import had happened in my absence. Not one single thing.
Mind you, TikTok for national police announcements hadn’t yet been invented.
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