Google is frighteningly good nowadays. We were trying last night to remember the title of a 1960s film about a photographer who realises he may have witnessed and photographed a murder. Not only could we not remember what the film was called, we couldn't think who had directed it, or recall the name of the star. I remembered that at one point he bought an aeroplane propeller in an antique shop (it was an arty film), and that the main character was rather good looking, but didn't think either of those details would be of any use as search terms. I thought that it featured a young Jane Asher, but checking her filmography didn't produce anything.
While the Systems Administrator went off to watch the Christmas special of Downton Abbey, I typed film photographer murder into the Google search box and bingo, there it was, three of the top five results referring to Blowup, directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and starring David Hemmings. Turns out that Jane Birkin was in it, not Jane Asher, along with Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Peter Bowles. It won the 1967 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. I should think it would be a film you could safely claim to like in hip metropolitan circles and expect to win cultural brownie points, though you might need to be able to remember a bit more about the plot than knowing that David Hemmings buys a propeller.
How spooky is it, though, that out of all the digitally stored information of the past forty-seven years, Google knows that I am on about a 1966 art film? The other two results in the top five were a 2004 horror film, and a 2013 Daily Mail article about the shooting of an Egyptian photographer. There must be thousands upon thousands of stories that combine those three terms in a perfectly plausible manner, the deaths of numerous war photographers for starters, and I didn't even think to include the fact that I was looking for something dating from the 1960s, and not anything recent. How well does Google know the inside of my head by now, and what would come up for other people typing the same three words into their computers?
Meanwhile, I have finally done something I've been meaning to do for ages, and saved every file on the computer to a memory stick. The internal power system of the SA's laptop failed suddenly and completely a while back, and the SA ended up forking out a hundred quid for the contents of the hard drive to be professionally retrieved. Following this episode, the SA bought us each a memory stick for back-up purposes. Mine sat on my desk for a long time, because I did not know how to save every file, except by selecting each one individually and saving it in turn. Then I could not find the stick. Then I tidied up my desk, and found the stick again, so every now and then we would have a conversation in which I said the SA must show me how to save everything, without my ever picking a moment when it was actually convenient for the SA to do so.
The SA was an early adopter of computing. We still have the early 1980s Amstrad tucked away somewhere in the spare bedroom, that was the SA's at Oxford. I was not an early adopter. I am not technophobic, I will happily use a computer, to gratify my curiosity about 1960s film titles or maintain a blog, but I am not truly at all interested in the inner workings of the computer, any more than I am interested in what happens under the bonnet of my Skoda. I have the Skoda serviced at the correct intervals, and if it breaks down I call the AA. I am not proud of my massive indifference to technology. I can see it would be better, more useful and safer, to know more about the machinery that underpins my daily life. As my old tutor said, you don't have to like it, you just have to be able to do it. My weakness lies in charging around doing the things I do like, while thinking I will get round to learning the dull things later.
If you put two people together in a house, and one is of a kindly disposition and understands how technical stuff works, while the other is faintly bored by anything technical and not too proud to ask for help, you can pretty much predict the outcome. So it is that after thirteen years of owning a computer, I still didn't know how to save all the files at once. In fact, it was worse than that. I was looking for the Excel spreadsheet of interesting sounding films I wanted to watch, which the computer had saved to a temporary address and then hidden, and did not know how to look for it properly. The SA had to talk me through how to use the file handler, so I thought that could be the moment to ask about the universal saving as well.
The spreadsheet of films seems gone beyond recovery. Even the SA had to admit that it seemed no longer to exist, which shows how sensible it would be to back up the other files, and how foolish I have been to go un-backed up for so long. The selecting and saving everything took practically no time at all. It is terrifying how much you can put on one memory stick, and how easy they are to lose.
No comments:
Post a Comment