Hyped-up gadgets give SCP director Paul Schnabel such a headache he could do with a tablet. An electronic tablet, that is.

My first mobile telephone weighed three kilos and was the size of an attaché case. That was only twenty years ago. A few years earlier we decided our institute needed a fax. One fax mind you, for more than a hundred employees. At about the same time we had our first computer installed, a simple word processor with big floppy disks.
Meanwhile I was still using a small Olivetti typewriter at home, a bottle of correction fluid at the ready and a spare ink ribbon in the desk drawer. The turn table had been replaced by a cd player but only just. Changing a headlight bulb was easy then and the thing itself hardly cost anything. A TomTom was beyond anybody’s imagination and cars didn’t park themselves.
‘Friends’
All this has come about in the blink of an eye and the pace of change is accelerating still. My mobile is as light as a feather and has more functionalities than I know what to do with. Every night my big laptop introduces me to an average of ten people I don’t know but who want to be my ‘friend’. It turns out I have a entry on Wikipedia. I have no idea who wrote it, much less who corrected the mistakes it contained. I can look at photographs of myself on Google. I don’t have these photographs myself. Who has taken them and why are they there?
I now carry a small laptop which I do not use to go on the internet. That gives me at least the illusion of privacy although I know it’s only a matter of time before I start googling on my little notebook. But I have resisted twitter and I’m still not on Facebook or Hyves. On LinkedIn I usually click on ‘accept’ but merely out of politeness. ‘Ignore’ or ‘delete’ seems rude but if the list of ‘friends’ becomes too long I’m not beyond removing them all in one fell swoop. It seems less personal that way.
Tablet
Soon we will be taking another big step up the ladder of information technology. We are thinking of introducing the tablet at the institute. It’s another one of those words which has taken on a whole new meaning. I’m not quite convinced yet but perhaps I should be. In the upper chamber the senators are using them and are no longer lugging around paper laden bags as heavy as my first mobile phone.
I do like the idea of being able to read books on a tablet. Friends – not ‘friends’- have shown me how clear the image is. You can even go out in the garden with it because it hardly reflects the light.
Simple
It rarely pays to go for the latest medium the minute it comes on the market. It’s expensive and suffers from all sorts of annoying design hiccups. Wait a year or two and it will probably be clear which model is best and chances are you’ll pay a lot less as well.
The people who cannot resist the latest gadgets are also the ones who weed out the unnecessary innovations. I only started texting on my mobile when I purchased one with a proper keyboard. The old one worked like some sort of Morse code machine. I couldn’t be bothered. I like to keep things simple.
Paul Schnabel is head of the government’s social policy unit SCP