You would learn that 500 million of us now reach out to the rest of the planet via Twitter. We ‘tweet’ what we are doing and where we are. We tweet our anger and our joy. We tweet our insights and we break news. We collect ‘followers’. We are warned that if we don’t tweet then we won’t get ahead in life, that our business won’t move forward. We are told that we must “follow to be followed” and we have tweet decks and hootsuites to help us organise and schedule our messages, over 340 million of which are sent every day.
You will have heard of Apple. Indeed, you owned an early Macintosh back in the day and thought it was quite the thing. But since you went to ‘sleep’, Apple became the most valuable company on the planet with market cap of 600 billion USD. You would be surprised to see that 99.999 per cent of us use one typing program, Microsoft Word and that a nerd from Seattle has been, and might still be again, the richest man in the world with a net worth of 61 billion USD. Meanwhile, you find that you now “Google” – yes it has become a verb – to find out stuff.
You will no doubt be anxious to make up for lost time, so what better way to reconnect than with Facebook? You can track down old friends and even stalk old lovers. If you are lucky you can hook up, go out with them, and in some cases, wreck their relationships. Hey! You knew them first!
Of course, you had heard of mobile phones before your coma but a quarter of a century ago, these were as big as a bottle of arak and wielded by Gordon Gekko, who you remember seeing in Wall Street doing deals in a towelling robe on the beach at dawn. Yes he was very cool, but now we all have one and guess what? They run our lives too.
Eventually, you’ll find that you are lost and anxious if you leave your device at home. At times like these, you will feel the need to tell everyone that back in the day we lived very happily without one. You always found your way to the party and friends certainly never arrived at your house talking on the phone.
You will also remind us that back in the day, you could go for a walk with someone you liked and wanted to know better without that person receiving calls or text messages - all beseechingly prefixed with a “Sorry! I’ve got to reply to this” - because again, nobody knew where anyone else was and in any case, it could wait. It could always wait.
Eventually, you’ll discover webcams and Skype. You may even figure out that you can have something called ‘online sex’ with people you love, like or in many cases, hardly even know. To find them you can join forums where you can meet people with similar tastes but you will be advised to that there are some weird people “out there”.
Like Armin Meiwes, a 40-year old German, who befriended the like-minded Bernd Jürgen Brandeson on Cannibal Café, a site for gay cannibals. Meiwes was “looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to slaughter and consume”. Brandeson wanted it all. So he bled to death while Meiwes happily cooked his genitals….
I bet you wish you had never woken up.
