Chapter 11 - The Pandemic Arrives
Thank goodness for smartphones
The final section of the book was supposed to explore what the tools of the smartphone era could do to help me deal with my personal health challenges. Then, as I sat down to write in the early months of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic arrived. My focus shifted to the impact of technology during a global health crisis.
This chapter describes how quickly the world changed. I set off on a work trip to California in early February with the virus still feeling a very distant threat. At a Silicon Valley think-in at Facebook’s headquarters attended by a couple of Nobel prizewinners and a young British quantum physicist recruited to work in Downing Street by Dominic Cummings, it hardly got a mention.
But a few days later at a Samsung mobile phone launch in San Francisco we had to walk past a temperature scanner at the entrance and inside got a first sight of people wearing masks - still something of an eccentric choice rather than compulsory back then.
Back home, the seriousness of the situation was slow to dawn on me. Even on March 7th I was standing on a packed terrace at Griffin Park, frequently submerged in a scrum of happy fans as Brentford put five goals past Sheffield Wednesday.
But on March 23rd we went into lockdown, I retreated to a room in our loft - and continued to work much as before. What soon struck me was just how vital the tools of the smartphone era had become. for both work and play. I tried to work out how we would have coped if the virus had struck us in 2005, before those tools were widely available. Here’s an extract from the chapter:
So much of what we use our phones for today would not have been possible.
Take social media, for instance. The very term would have been greeted with quizzical looks, even though many people were rediscovering old school friends via the British site Friends Reunited, which was bought by ITV in 2005. Facebook was a year old, but was still an American college phenomenon, only arriving in UK universities in the autumn of that year. Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had been invented, let alone Snapchat and TikTok, although YouTube was born that summer, and Twitter would come along the following year.
Back then, for just about everyone who was not a Blackberry-toting executive, the Internet and email were something to be experienced on an office or home computer rather than on the move. In the UK, about 8 million households had a broadband connection, allowing their computers to access the Internet at speeds of up to 10 megabits per second, while 7 million homes were still crawling along at dial-up speeds. That meant that all sorts of services that would later prove vital during the lockdown were only just getting off the ground.
While Skype had been started by Swedish entrepreneurs in 2003, it was for cheap Internet telephony, and video calls would not be added to the service until 2006. In fact, the whole idea of video telephones, first demonstrated at the 1964 World’s Fair, had yet to become a reality – at least for anyone but a few people in businesses able to afford high-end video-conferencing services.
No Zooming back then, no communing with friends using apps such as House Party, no office gossip circulating via WhatsApp or Slack or Facebook Messenger or countless other services. As for entertainment, instead of a plethora of online services from Netflix to Spotify to the online gaming platform Twitch, we would have had to get by with good, old-fashioned broadcast TV and radio, while raiding our collections of CDs and videotapes.
Without well-developed online learning platforms, and with quite a high proportion of children having neither a computer nor a home broadband connection, delivering schooling would have been even tougher. Schools might have put a few worksheets in the post, but making sure homework was completed would have been down to parents.
While shutting down the airlines, most shops and much of the services sector did enormous damage to the economy in 2020, it would have been even worse 15 years earlier. During the coronavirus pandemic, many people whose work involved commuting to an office found that they could operate at least as effectively from home, a development that is likely to have lasting consequences for patterns of work and transport use. Maybe that would still have been the case in 2005, but without smartphones, video-conferencing and fast broadband connections it is difficult to see how that would have worked well for many people. It would certainly have been much harder for me to broadcast from my loft, or for us to put together an entire radio programme without going into the office.
As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, we had very quickly become accustomed to the tools of the social smartphone era, even blasé about them, and mistrustful of the technology giants which provided them. Now we embraced them as never before, and tried to make sure elderly relatives had access to them. The debate about the digital divide between young and old, town and country, acquired a new urgency as it became clear that fast broadband was now an essential service – and, according to some, a better destination for public funds than a high-speed rail route. The wave of enthusiasm for digital technology which in the UK had peaked around the time of the London Olympics in 2012 had faded as we’d grown more and more worried about what smartphones and social media were doing to society and to us as individuals. Now that switchback ride between hopes for the technology and fear of it seemed to have taken us on another upwards path, as the virus made us fall back in love with it.
For the tech giants, the impact of the pandemic on their businesses. was seismic - in a good way. While many businesses teetered on the brink, their profits and share prices soared as demand for online shopping and entertainment took off.
Of course, the virus also shone a spotlight on the negative side of their technology, notably the speed at which misinformation and conspiracy theories could spread over their networks. That is the subject of a later chapter.
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