Forget MP3 where's Captain Kirk's tricorder?

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 23, 2000 | by Pat Kane

future shock To try the future, you have to buy the future. And be prepared to keep the till receipt when it all goes horribly wrong. Since Christmas, our household has been the scene of an interesting lifestyle experiment. Which of the married couple's new-fangled digital gizmos - deposited by Santa via Dixons - goes back to the shop first?

Last week I had to finally admit defeat: I just couldn't get my MP3 player to work. To make matters worse, my partner's new electronic organiser is turning a former militant technophobe into a faintly smug technophile. "Lovely present, darling", she'll murmur distantly, daintily tapping her little keyboard, increasing tenfold the efficiency of her busy life. Meanwhile I am crouched like a question mark over a spectacularly inert PC, trying to figure out why this goddamned D'Angelo album simply won't download.

Note the bead of sexist sweat trickling down that last paragraph. Santa, after all, can only bring you what you ask him for. And if you ask him for a basically hedonistic silicon indulgence - Hey! Beck tracks free from the web! Cool! - rather than a practical product for everyday living well, you have only your chromosomes to blame. Boys, toys, blah blah blah.

My current shame reminds me of those early-morning moments in the mid-1990s when the simple matter of getting your e-mail to work made you feel like Alan Turing tracking down U-Boats from Bletchley Park. Those wires! Those long strings of numbers!

We all know cyberia is composed of one part reality, one part bullshit and one part irretrievably lost down the back of the sofa. But sometimes - and this is one such time - you get the chance to really assess which bit of plastic'n'silicon is going to take off big- time in the marketplace. And between MP3 players and personal organisers, there's no contest.

There's no contest because there's no option. The only way I can see that you can really "MP3" - you know, rollerblading around the urbanscape with your digital player pumping some skate-dub into your lugs - is to go and live where all the adverts are set. And it seems just a little too much add-on expenditure to relocate to Palo Alto, California, just so you can get a computer that doesn't take less than an hour to download one crackly half of a Public Enemy single.

Never has a fashionable hi-tech product felt so totally five- years-too-early as this. Come back to me, MP3, when I don't have to be a naturalised American to make you work. Or as clever as a particle physicist at Cern to switch you on.

Now, your personal organiser that makes perfect sense to me. Or at least it does now, as I jealously gaze over my wife's shoulder. I watch her transform all her scraps of notepaper and loose Filofax pages into a rigorously ordered database. I'm pleased for her - I really am. The fact I want to drop the thing down the toilet and exult wildly as it sizzles into total uselessness is really something between me and my therapist.

For aren't we all, in the words of the American writer David Shenk, looking for ways to clear our data smog? And, when you think about it, isn't the personal organiser the best potential way to see some daylight?

Some of you - perhaps all of you - may remember the original, brocade-trimmed 1960s Star Trek. One of the items that Cap'n Kirk never seemed to be without was his tricorder: a cheese-wedged, formica-coated bleeper straight out of Prop Central. It seemed to be the only item the busy Federation officer would ever need. He could use it to communicate with the Enterprise, get it to show him complicated diagrams of dilithium crystals on a neat screen, and give it voice commands to beam him out of trouble. The only thing it couldn't do was blast alien flesh. You clearly needed a blaster for that.

But the tricorder is, in effect, what the personal organiser could be - especially if it starts linking up with our mobile phones and all those fabulous realms of wireless frequency passing over our heads. And, just like a Federation away team, the computer-mobile will enable us to roam the galaxy - or, at the very least, drive our Galaxies - while bringing our complex lives along with us.

Let me make two blithely confident predictions for the next decade, when mobile computing really gets up to speed. It will almost single-handedly revive the public realm, and it will revolutionise the relationship between work and leisure.

Test yourself with these questions. Where would you rather be when you're going through your e-mails of a morning? Sitting with your knees under a desk in a cubicle - or kicking back in a coffee palace with Betty Carter singing in your ears?

When you spend, say, eight-plus hours a week commuting on a train and you're despairing at how little time you have to sort out the details of your life, what would you rather do on your journey? Lean your forehead against the glass and thud slowly at the pointlessness of it all? Or whip out your wireless organiser and spend the travelling time paying bills, ordering food and sending thank you cards, all online?