Saturday Soapbox: It just worked?

[Administrator]

The Murderer is a Ray Bradbury short story from the 1950s, and it tells the tale of a psychiatrist interviewing a man who's been on a very peculiar crime spree. In a ten-minutes-into-the-future sort of world in which personal communication devices are pretty much omnipresent, he's gotten himself arrested for killing his telephone, his wrist radio communicator, his inter-office chat machine, his television, and his hideous, babbling, overly-connected house. After conducting a quick appraisal, the psychiatrist goes back to his desk to write his report, and the rest of his day plays out as an endless series of interruptions: this phone and then that phone, the wrist radio, the intercom, the phones again.
I first read The Murderer about ten years ago, and it seemed powerfully prescient: texts arrived and calls came in as I ploughed through it - my phone never seemed to stop buzzing, in fact. I read it again last week, however, and it had lost a little of its sting. The era of Facebook and Twitter should have made it yet more timely, if anything, but I just didn't feel Bradbury's soothsaying coming through quite as strongly in 2012. Social media has certainly done its bit to give us all the feeling that we now live, rather awkwardly, in our friends' mouths, but if I still spend my day pinging between phone calls, emails, texts, and, um, FaceTime, I don't notice it as much. That's because the relationship I have with my phone - and isn't that a weird proposition? - has really changed of late.
If I was the psychiatrist in Bradbury's story, then, the end of the narrative might go like this. Back to the desk for a few minutes typing. Check Letterpress and make a couple of plays. Spend a quarter of an hour with Drop7. Back to typing. Back to Letterpress. Over to Solipskier. Over to Hero Academy. Tiny Wings, God of Blades, Taiso. Aaaaaaaaand fired.
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