New father Charlie Brooker has caught himself shouting at the machines in his life, given the matter careful consideration, and decided that it's OK — more than OK, really. For Brooker, the future will involve lots of shouting at machines. Makes me wonder if there isn't something to be said for designing machines that understand why you're shouting at them.
I used to play vertical-scrolling shoot-em-ups in which a blizzard of angry pixels swirled around the screen like a synchronised galaxy impersonating a flock of starlings, accompanied by a melodic soundtrack of pops and whistles apparently performed by an orchestra of frenzied Bop-It machines. But at least then you could press pause. Now I find it hard to cope with seeing a banner ad slowly fading from red to green while the The One Show's on in the background, which is why over the past few weeks I've ratcheted down my engagement with anything not made of wood. There's a baby to attend to, and his old man needs a lie down.
Because the alternative is to surround myself with technology designed specifically for shouting at. And that's the more uplifting feature of the horrible future I pictured for this baby I'm talking about, the baby I vowed to never mention in print because to do so would instantly mark me out as a prick: in the future, we'll have specially designed anguish-venting machines – unfeeling robots wearing bewildered faces for older people to scream into like adult babies, just to let out all the stress caused by constant exposure to yappering, feverish stimuli. Tomorrow will consist of flashing lights and off-the-shelf digital punchbags, consumed by a generation better equipped to deal with it than me, which won't matter because by then I will have withdrawn entirely from the digital world: an old man, enjoying his lie down.
It's OK to shout at machines – in fact, in the future some of us will find it necessary
(via Making Light)
(Image: Shout, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from garryknight's photostream)
