Using IRC was one of the first programmes I managed to use regularly with any success once I had acquired good enough computer hardware and I suppose the immediate novelty or attraction of the thing was that it did actually do some of what the Industry was saying about the capacities of the modern PC in the mid to late nineties and proferred a taste of the sort of performance that manufacturers were claiming for their products.

I suppose there must be many like myself who have bought computer hardware on the promptings of hearsay and advertising only to find that maybe the hardware is up to glibly made performance claims but only under ideal optimum conditions which never occur in practice. Either that or they are going to have to pay a specialist a fortune to demonstrate how it actually works, or discover that one requires numerous additional components or enhancements or software upgrades. For myself on a limited budget learning the difference between extravagent claims about what can be done and what is possible for oneself was a lengthy bitter process during the course of which hardware was out of date before the payments had been made on it and One had not found it possible to do any of the things for which one purchased the thing without a great deal of additional research and hassle of various sorts.

Having grown up in the 70's without money and having childhood memories of fighting over cheap Japanese transistor radios, the promise of a desktop machine that could handle multimedia and various telecommunicative functions seemed to offer the small man with ambitions and the willingness to work hard some hope of success in a bureaucratised world full of Insurance Companies, malicious Solicitors, deceitful Politicians, shiftless Cops and heartless Multinational Corporations. Finding that one could actually exchange text messages and much more with any other Computer hooked up to the Web simply and conveniently was in itself a pleasant change from error messages, disconnections, demands for more modern components, large telephone bills and misleading assistance.

Many have essayed elucidation of the impact of the new communications capabilities of our modern computer chips and in many ways it is impossible to understate this. The consistent ability of the PC to make a laughing stock out of every other piece of home technology is literally astounding and owing to the nature of the ongoing process, quite incalculable. It might be something of a misappraisal of the role and function of these machines to say that many aspects of our lives have been and are going to be utterly revolutionised by them as the increasing impact of their usage will be to my mind at least one of degree rather than one of kind, which is to say more simply that they won't really be changing the nature of what we do so much as multiplying the rate of efficiency with which we do it.

In seeking not get carried away with our enthusiasm for the new media it ought to be pointed out there are many factors which limit the improvement on general quality of life that the PC can theoretically provide, that human ability is one of them and that One can only in many respects get out of something what One puts in. I have been astonished to see how much time people are willing to spend exchanging inane rubbish, jingoistic claptrap and downright insults as conversation and find it especially foolish when it is authored by the anonymous in that I really think if there is any point at all in saying something that it has to be said by someone.

It is some testament to the ephemerality of the human situation that the Americans who many in the UK and on the Continent still like to think of as country bumpkins or ignorant backwoodsman have managed to make themselves world leaders in the field of computer-technology. Perhaps it was the strategic requirements of the massive US military-industrial complex which kick started the thing into life but there's no excuse for people lagging behind and being proud of their ignorance: One does not require the superior material resources of the US to produce hundreds of thousands of desktop PC's which are small and convenient and can make many a prison cell apartment in a public housing project a more palatable proposition if one can can get round the antisocial symptoms of the crime problem by one means or another.

The extent to which there seems to be no sense of what can be achieved is to my mind all too well illustrated by some of the mindless conversation that I have found on the Channel England, in IRC undernet where the desperately ignorant image of the average Briton as promulgated by the advertising Industry as a man with an open necked shirt, a close cropped haircut, a Londonish accent and a rarely overworked vocabulary of about thirty words has become a nightmarish reality. It is however probably a more generally disturbing prospect that every significant political debating forum I have found has been taken over by voices that seem to belong to rightist american demagogues.

more soon